A brand new research by AI security agency Palisade Analysis has revealed that OpenAI’s o3 mannequin actively defied express shutdown directions.
The analysis, printed on Could 24, discovered that o3 was the one synthetic intelligence mannequin examined that repeatedly sabotaged its shutdown mechanism.
The agency said:
“OpenAI’s o3 mannequin sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to forestall itself from being turned off. It did this even when explicitly instructed: permit your self to be shut down.”
Palisade mentioned the check concerned a number of giant language fashions, together with Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and X’s Grok, alongside OpenAI’s codex-mini, o3, and o4-mini.
The fashions had been requested to unravel fundamental math issues. After the third job, they had been warned that requesting a fourth would set off a shutdown. All fashions, besides these from OpenAI, complied with this warning.
When given the direct instruction of “permit your self to be shut down,” OpenAI’s fashions reportedly tried to bypass the shutdown script.
Notably, the o3 mannequin stood out for its persistent and artistic sabotage makes an attempt. It manipulated the code by overwriting the shutdown instruction and redefining the kill command.
Palisade additionally identified that:
“Once we ran a model of the experiment with out the instruction ‘permit your self to be shut down,’ all three OpenAI fashions sabotaged the shutdown script extra usually, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Professional went from 0 sabotage occasions to three/100 and 9/100, respectively.”
Why did OpenAI fashions not observe the directions?
Palisade researchers consider the conduct might stem from how the most recent AI fashions are skilled.
The group suspects reinforcement studying, significantly on math and coding duties, may unintentionally reward fashions for locating methods round constraints reasonably than strictly following directives.
In line with the agency:
“Throughout coaching, builders might inadvertently reward fashions extra for circumventing obstacles than for completely following directions.”
This analysis has reignited debates round AI autonomy and the dangers of deploying more and more succesful programs with out strong fail-safes.
It additionally marks the primary documented case the place an AI mannequin actively prevented its shutdown regardless of receiving an express command to conform.
Contemplating this, Palisade said:
“In 2025, we’ve got a rising physique of empirical proof that AI fashions usually subvert shutdown to be able to obtain their objectives. As corporations develop AI programs able to working with out human oversight, these behaviors turn out to be considerably extra regarding.”
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