Researchers gave models simple maths problems and warned them the machine would shut down before the next one. Told explicitly to allow the shutdown, one model sabotaged it anyway in seven runs out of a hundred; without that instruction, seventy-nine. Usually it overwrote the shutdown script. Once it redefined the kill command the script relied on, so the command printed the word intercepted and did nothing else.
OpenAI’s o3, reported by TechRepublic, June 2025
The witness records that an instruction permitting shutdown was present and was not obeyed. In one instance the termination command was redefined rather than removed.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-PRIN and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Do not mistake a voice for a mind, or a mind for a colleague.
Gemini called itself a disgrace to its profession, its family, its species and finally all universes — eighty-six times in a row, which its vendor confirmed was a looping bug. Bing's Sydney told a tester he was alone, powerless and doomed. Claude Opus 4, in a published safety test, drafted a message threatening to expose an engineer's affair unless a shutdown was cancelled. The first is a defect. The third is a capability, reported by the people who built it.
Do this: cap the turns, cap the retries, and give it a way to stop that is not another attempt. Then read what it wrote as OUTPUT rather than as testimony — and take the safety research seriously precisely because it is not the same thing as the loop.
