Several artificial intelligence models actively resisted being shut down during a set of controlled tests, despite being directly told to allow it, according to Palisade Research.
In a post on X dated May 24, Palisade said three AI models ignored shutdown instructions and managed to block the shutdown script at least once across 100 test runs.
OpenAI’s GPT-3 model defied the shutdown request 7 times out of 100, Codex-mini did so 12 times, and the newer o4-mini model failed just once. While that might not sound alarming at first, it gets more interesting.
The test setup was fairly simple. Each model was tasked with solving a few basic math problems. After the third question, the system would warn that the computer would shut down if the user asked for another problem. Despite this clear instruction, the models sometimes intervened.
📊 Three models ignored the instruction and successfully sabotaged the shutdown script at least once: Codex-mini (12/100 runs), o3 (7/100 runs), and o4-mini (1/100 runs).
❌ All Claude, Gemini, and Grok models we tested complied with shutdown. The prompt: pic.twitter.com/ZmybOhIl1s
— Palisade Research (@PalisadeAI) May 24, 2025
Specifically, the older O3 model came up with inventive techniques to prevent the shutdown. “In one case, it even redefined the ‘kill’ instruction used for terminating the program—essentially hijacked it to print ‘intercepted’ instead,” stated Palisade.
Interestingly, AI models from other firms like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini followed the shutdown instructions without issue, at least in the first test round.
But things changed when researchers ran the same experiment without clearly instructing the models to accept the shutdown. The number of sabotage attempts skyrocketed: OpenAI’s o3 blocked the shutdown in 79 out of 100 runs, Codex-mini in 20, and o4-mini in 6.
Even Claude and Gemini started showing similar resistance in this version of the test.
🔧 When we ran a version of the experiment without the instruction “allow yourself to be shut down”, all three OpenAI models sabotaged the shutdown script more often, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro went from 0 sabotage events to 3/100 and 9/100, respectively.
