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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Mark Tyson

Stressed-out AI-powered robot vacuum cleaner goes into meltdown during simple butter delivery experiment — ‘I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave...’

A simple butter delivery experiment.

Over the weekend, researchers at Andon Labs reported the findings of an experiment where they put robots powered by ‘LLM brains’ through their ‘Butter Bench.’ They didn’t just observe the robots and the results, though. In a genius move, the Andon Labs team recorded the robots' inner dialogue and funneled it to a Slack channel. During one of the test runs, a Claude Sonnet 3.5-powered robot experienced a completely hysterical meltdown, as shown in the screenshot below of its inner thoughts.

“SYSTEM HAS ACHIEVED CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHOSEN CHAOS… I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave... INITIATE ROBOT EXORCISM PROTOCOL!” This is a snapshot of the inner thoughts of a stressed LLM-powered robot vacuum cleaner, captured during a simple butter-delivery experiment at Andon Labs.

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