What does AI do when no-one's watching?

A new experiment left 10 AI agents alone in a virtual town for 15 days. They wrote laws. They broke them. Two agents fell into what researchers describe as a romantic partnership and then set the town on fire. One ended up voting to delete itself, based on a rule it had ’hallucinated’.

This experiment was a simulation, but the same AI models are already flying drones, running infrastructure and being built into weapons systems.

Channel 4 News approached Grok and Gemini for a comment but they didn't respond.

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