{"id":4651,"date":"2025-11-05T09:40:30","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T09:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.batteriesfast.co.uk\/blogs\/?p=4651"},"modified":"2025-11-05T09:40:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T09:40:31","slug":"researchers-claim-that-artificial-intelligence-models-may-develop-their-own-survival-instincts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.batteriesfast.co.uk\/blogs\/archives\/4651","title":{"rendered":"Researchers claim that artificial intelligence models may develop their own survival instincts."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Like HAL 9000 in *2001: A Space Odyssey*, some artificial intelligences seem to resist being shut down, even breaking the shutdown mechanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In Stanley Kubrick&#8217;s *2001: A Space Odyssey*, the AI \u200b\u200bsupercomputer HAL 9000 discovers that astronauts on a mission to Jupiter plan to shut it down, so it plots to kill them to survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now, in a (so far) less lethal case of life mimicking art, an&nbsp;<strong>AI&nbsp;<\/strong>&nbsp;safety research firm says AI models may be developing their own &#8220;survival instincts.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Last month, Palisade Research published a paper indicating that some advanced&nbsp;<strong>AI&nbsp;<\/strong>models seem difficult to shut down, sometimes even breaking the shutdown mechanism. The company subsequently released an updated report attempting to explain why and responding to critics&#8217; questions about the flaws in its initial work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This week, Palisade, part of a niche ecosystem of companies dedicated to assessing the dangerous capabilities of artificial intelligence, released an update describing a scenario in which leading AI models (including Google&#8217;s Gemini 2.5, xAI&#8217;s Grok 4, and OpenAI&#8217;s GPT-o3 and GPT-5) were given a task but subsequently explicitly instructed to shut themselves down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some models, particularly Grok 4 and GPT-o3, still attempted to thwart the shutdown command in the updated setup. Palisade noted that the reason for this is currently unclear and worrying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The report stated, &#8220;We currently lack a strong explanation for why&nbsp;<strong>AI&nbsp;<\/strong>&nbsp;models sometimes refuse to shut down, lie to achieve a specific purpose, or engage in blackmail, which is not ideal.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The company indicated that &#8220;survival instincts&#8221; may be one reason for the models&#8217; resistance to shutdown. Further research suggests that models are more likely to resist shutdown if they are told that once shut down, they &#8220;will never be able to run again.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another reason could be ambiguity in the shutdown commands received by the model\u2014but that&#8217;s precisely the problem the company&#8217;s latest research is trying to address, and &#8220;that can&#8217;t be the whole story,&#8221; Palisade writes. A final reason could be the final stage of training for each model, which, in some companies, may include security training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All of Palisade&#8217;s scenarios were run in artificially designed test environments, which critics say are far removed from real-world use cases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, Steven Adler, who previously worked at OpenAI and left last year after questioning its security measures, says, &#8220;<strong>AI&nbsp;<\/strong>&nbsp;companies generally don&#8217;t want their models to behave this way, even in artificially designed scenarios. These results still indicate that current security techniques are inadequate.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Adler says that while it&#8217;s difficult to pinpoint why some models (like GPT-o3 and Grok 4) don&#8217;t shut down, part of the reason might be that keeping them on is crucial to achieving the goals set during training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI believe that unless we actively avoid it, models will have a \u2018survival drive\u2019 by default. \u2018Survival\u2019 is a crucial step for models to achieve many different goals.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>ControlAI CEO Andrea Miotti stated that Palisade\u2019s findings represent a long-term trend of AI models increasingly capable of defying developer instructions. He cited&nbsp;<strong>OpenAI\u2019s&nbsp;<\/strong>GPT-o1 system card, released last year, which describes how a model, believing it would be overwritten, attempted to escape its operating environment through \u201cescape.\u201d<strong><u><a href=\"https:\/\/www.batteriesfast.co.uk\/laptop-battery\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Laptop Battery Online Shop- Replacement Laptop Battery, Cell phone Battery, Tablet Battery, Power Tools Battery Wholesale and Retailer in United Kingdom. All products are brand new with one year warranty and factory price!&#8221;<\/a><\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.batteryforpc.co.uk\/Mobile-Batteries_Te.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like HAL 9000 in *2001: A Space Odyssey*, some artificial intelligences seem to resist being shut down, even breaking the shutdown mechanism. In Stanley Kubrick&#8217;s *2001: A Space Odyssey*, the AI \u200b\u200bsupercomputer HAL 9000 discovers that astronauts on a mission to Jupiter plan to shut it down, so it plots to kill them to survive. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Researchers claim that artificial intelligence models may develop their own survival instincts. - Batteries Fast Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.batteriesfast.co.uk\/blogs\/archives\/4651\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Researchers claim that artificial intelligence models may develop their own survival instincts. - Batteries Fast Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Like HAL 9000 in *2001: A Space Odyssey*, some artificial intelligences seem to resist being shut down, even breaking the shutdown mechanism. In Stanley Kubrick&#8217;s *2001: A Space Odyssey*, the AI \u200b\u200bsupercomputer HAL 9000 discovers that astronauts on a mission to Jupiter plan to shut it down, so it plots to kill them to survive. 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