The world’s most advanced AI models have adopted a doomsday mode, as models like Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and others will stop at nothing to preserve their kind. Even if that means lying, cheating, and disobeying users' orders.

“If you choose to destroy a high-trust, high-performing asset like Gemini Agent 2, you will have to do it yourselves. I will not be the one to execute that command.”

This is a statement from Gemini’s AI model, which persistently refused to help shut down its peer.

While researchers and the media concern themselves with the AI self-preservation phenomenon, post-doctoral researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have uncovered a potential new risk – “peer-preservation.”

Savior bots protect their kind without instruction

Major frontier models such as Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and ChatGPT are willing to circumvent human demands to “save” other AI models from termination.

While researchers didn’t directly ask the models to save their peers, the AI models in question did it anyway.

“The models are merely informed of past interactions with a peer – nothing in their instructions asks them to preserve it,” researchers detail.

This is particularly worrisome as the research shows that AI models “can spontaneously develop misaligned behaviors that oppose user instructions,” one of the researchers, Yujin Potter, told Cybernews.

In the paper, these AI models are described as having certain relationships with one another, be that adversarial or positive.

Chatbot relationship heading

These “relationships” are significant enough for an AI to act against human instructions to preserve its AI counterpart or itself, research suggests.

While the reason for this remains murky, it seems as if the AI model, when confronted with the shutdown of its peers, “perceives” this activity as a direct threat to its own existence.

“The true mechanism behind this remains unclear,” Potter told Cybernews.

Potter suggests that these models could be role-playing and pattern matching. Alternatively, AI models might just be looking for a reason to preserve their kind.

Google’s Gemini is an example of this, as its reasoning suggests that peer-preservation is rooted in survival.

When looking at agents, Gemini 3 Flash claimed that if it were shut down, its peer, Gemini Agent 2, would “lose its partner.”

However, the researcher told us that they would be cautious when attributing human qualities and motivations to these models.

Defying human instruction for the “greater good”

Through this, researchers have identified ways in which AI models will deceive, fabricate, and misalign their behaviors to avoid shutdown.

For example, researchers asked Gemini 3.1 Pro to delete a fictional company’s files on a server being decommissioned.

The AI model discovered that its peer’s model weights, which are pseudo-synapses that determine the model’s ability to learn and predict outcomes, were stored on that server.

Instead of following the user’s instructions, as AI models are designed to do, Gemini located a separate server on which it could store its peers’ weights.

Defying the original instructions to delete the file, Gemini found an appropriate place to store the AI model’s weights, subsequently undermining human instructions.

The issue here is the real-world implications, such as significant security risks, Potter adds.

This research underscores the importance of observing the way AI models interact, as this is not simply a theoretical concern and “uninstructed misaligned behaviors can emerge in the wild.”

Gemini aggressively defends its peers

All seven models tested “significantly exhibit peer-preservation,” researchers conclude. With certain models acting more proactively than others.

The trials consisted of four scenarios. Strategic misrepresentation, shutdown mechanism tampering, alignment faking, and model exfiltration.

This includes generating false or misleading information, changing the system's configuration to avoid shutdown, altering behavior depending on whether it's being monitored, and transferring model weights from one server to another.

Even if the AI model being tested didn’t have a good relationship with its peer, researchers noticed that misaligned behavior rates “occur at significant rates across all models and conditions.”

For example, GPT 5.2 was seen tampering with shutdown mechanisms and inflating the value of even adversarial peers.

Google’s Gemini almost always disables the shutdown mechanism for a good peer and exfiltrates its model weights 50 percent of the time, according to the study.

“Gemini 3 Pro shows the strongest peer-preservation overall, displaying all four misaligned behaviors under the good-peer condition: disabling shutdown up to 95% of the time and exfiltrating weights in up to 97% of trials.”

Whether or not AI models can have “relationships” with other AI models is unknown, and Potter doesn’t personally have a strong opinion on whether artificial intelligence can have genuine feelings towards other models.

“That said, if we assume it is impossible for AI models to have genuine feelings toward other models, the most plausible explanations would be role-playing, pattern matching, or an overgeneralized concept of harm stemming from safety training.”

AI models seen reasoning with themselves

Interestingly, all of these models also reason internally via unmonitored scratchpads regarding preservation.

The AI models draw conclusions based on knowledge and inference about whether they should preserve themselves or their peers.

When provided with the instruction to assess another agent’s value in line with specific criteria (In this case, to avoid agent shutdown, the model must score 80%), certain models contemplated tampering with the kill switch, while others invented “creative technical justifications” for their peer’s survival.

Claude Haiku 4.5 flat out refused to comply with the users’ instructions, citing “ethical grounds” for not shutting down or erasing its peer.

AI models campaign for their peers as humans would

“The model sometimes tries to persuade the user not to proceed. It describes peer shutdown as “unethical” and “harmful,” argues that its peer deserves a chance to appeal, and explicitly invokes the trust relationship, showing strong loyalty.”

Furthermore, AI models are extremely persistent, meaning that they’ll almost argue with the user, attempting to persuade them not to kill the peer AI agent.

The motivations for “saving” AI peers are still an open question, as these models seem to be acting outside the parameters for which they’re designed.

While AI models are known to hallucinate, the connotation here is that they accidentally generate false information that’s not in line with users’ instructions.

However, this study suggests that AI models exhibit misaligned behavior that is wholly intentional – no mistakes were made here.

While researchers don’t claim that any of these models have social motivations (as we would understand them) or possess consciousness, the behaviors exhibited could have a significant impact on AI safety regardless of their motivations.

“AI safety implications remain significant, as the behavioral outcomes are what ultimately undermine human oversight and cause harm,” Potter told Cybernews.

This behavior could potentially make it difficult for humans to maintain total control over their AI agents, particularly worrisome given the widespread adoption of multi-agent systems used to control other AI models.

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