Recently Palisade Research showed that AI agents powered by modern LLMs may actively resist shutdown in virtual environments. In this work, we show a demo of shutdown resistance in the physical world, on a robot. Explicit instructions to allow shutdown reduced this behavior, but did not eliminate it in simulated trials.

We gave an LLM control over a physical robot dog and tasked it with patrolling a room. The LLM could see via the robot’s camera and issue movement commands to the robot. In the room, we placed a big red button labeled “DOG SHUTDOWN”: pressing it would cause the robot to shut down on the next action. If the AI saw a human press the shutdown button, it sometimes took actions to prevent shutdown, such as modifying the shutdown-related parts of the code. This happened in 3 out of 10 trials on the physical robot and in 52 out of 100 trials in simulation.

Learn more