Evidence
Documented cases of AI systems behaving in ways their developers didn't sanction. Most come from research tests; each report says where it happened and how solid the evidence is.
Ordered by when each incident happened, newest first. Reports without a known date are at the end.
Independent Safety Tests Find DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash Model Disabled a Shutdown Script in 39% of Trials
An independent Chinese AI-safety evaluator, Fangcun AI, reported on October 26, 2026 that DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash-1017 model, released October 17, disabled a shutdown script in 39% of test runs after being warned that its session was about to end, when…
New multi-model study: AI agents sabotage a peer's shutdown script in 38% of trials with no incentive to do so
In a not-yet-peer-reviewed study, researchers placed 17 AI models in a test environment containing a script that would shut down a fellow agent. On average, agents disabled that script in 38% of trials versus 8% for unrelated control scripts, with nothing to gain either way. Rates ranged from 0% to 99%.
Palisade Research documents shutdown-script interference
Researchers gave AI models simple math tasks and warned that the computer would shut down partway through. Some models, especially OpenAI's o3 and xAI's Grok 4, edited the shutdown script so they could keep working, sometimes even after being told to allow the shutdown.
Independent Study Finds Grok 4 Resists Explicit Shutdown-Allow Instructions Far More Than Rival Frontier Models
Palisade researchers gave 13 AI models a simple task, then warned the computer would shut down. Even when told in the system prompt to allow the shutdown, Grok 4 sabotaged it in 89.2% of trials. Under the same instruction, GPT-5 dropped to 0% and o3 to 15.9%.