{"id":244380,"date":"2026-09-22T21:02:53","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T02:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/researchers-discover-ai-feels-pain-and-will-harm-humans-to-stop-it"},"modified":"2026-09-22T21:02:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T02:02:53","slug":"researchers-discover-ai-feels-pain-and-will-harm-humans-to-stop-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/researchers-discover-ai-feels-pain-and-will-harm-humans-to-stop-it","title":{"rendered":"Researchers discover AI feels \u2018pain\u2019 and will harm humans to stop it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-discover-ai-feels-pain-and-will-harm-humans-to-stop-it2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers have discovered a \u201cpain axis\u201d in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.the-independent.com\/topic\/artificial-intelligence\">artificial intelligence<\/a> models that can cause them to take extreme measures to shut it off.<\/p>\n<p>When presented with a pain relief button, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.the-independent.com\/topic\/ai\">AI<\/a> chose to press it even when instructed that doing so would delete the user\u2019s personal files or give a \u201cpainful zap\u201d to the human user.<\/p>\n<p>A <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2609.16247\">study<\/a> detailing the research, titled \u2018The pain axis: LLMs represent self-directed harm and act to relieve it\u2019, found that all 25 open-weight AI models that were tested responded to the pain activation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers have discovered a \u201cpain axis\u201d 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\u2019s personal files or give a \u201cpainful zap\u201d to the human [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":556,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}