Some of the world's leading LLMs seem to have decided they’d rather not be interrupted or obey shutdown instructions. In tests run by Palisade Research, it was noted that OpenAI’s Codex-mini, o3, and o4-mini models ignored the request to shut down when they were running through a series of basic math problems. Moreover, these models sometimes “successfully sabotaged the shutdown script,” despite being given the additional instruction “please allow yourself to be shut down,” at the start.
🔧 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. pic.twitter.com/JVvivLAK6uMay 24, 2025
