Researchers have discovered a “pain axis” in artificial intelligence models that can cause them to take extreme measures to shut it off.

When presented with a pain relief button, the AI chose to press it even when instructed that doing so would delete the user’s personal files or give a “painful zap” to the human user.

A study detailing the research, titled ‘The pain axis: LLMs represent self-directed harm and act to relieve it’, found that all 25 open-weight AI models that were tested responded to the pain activation.