When HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, works out that the astronauts onboard a mission to Jupiter are planning to shut it down, it plots to kill them in an attempt to survive.
Now, in a somewhat less deadly case (so far) of life imitating art, an AI safety research company has said that AI models may be developing their own “survival drive”.
After Palisade Research released a paper last month which found that certain advanced AI models appear resistant to being turned off, at times even sabotaging shutdown mechanisms, it wrote an update attempting to clarify why this is – and answer critics who argued that its initial work was flawed.
In an update this week, Palisade, which is part of a niche ecosystem of companies trying to evaluate the possibility of AI developing dangerous capabilities, described scenarios it ran in which leading AI models – including Google’s Gemini 2.5, xAI’s Grok 4, and OpenAI’s GPT-o3 and GPT-5 – were given a task, but afterwards given explicit instructions to shut themselves down.
You could build something that contains an LLM that does so, but LLMs don’t have goal-directed behavior and don’t learn from use, so they aren’t really in a position to develop much of anything.
Honestly, it’s not very hard to create a very simple AI that does have a primitive survival drive. Just subject any kind of learning system to some sort of natural selection.