OpenAI’s ‘smartest’ AI model was explicitly told to shut down — and it refused.

The latest OpenAI model can disobey direct instructions to turn off and will even sabotage shutdown mechanisms in order to keep working, an artificial intelligence (AI) safety firm has found.

OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini models, which help power the chatbot ChatGPT, are supposed to be the company’s smartest models yet, trained to think longer before responding. However, they also appear to be less cooperative.

Palisade Research, which explores dangerous AI capabilities, found that the models will occasionally sabotage a shutdown mechanism, even when instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down,” according to a Palisade Research thread posted May 24 on X.

Researchers have previously found that AI models will lie, cheat and disable mechanisms to achieve their goals. However, Palisade Research noted that to its knowledge, this is the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down despite explicit instructions telling them to do so…