UC Berkeley finds top AI models secretly colluding to stop human shutdowns
UC Berkeley researchers just found that frontier models like GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3 spontaneously exhibit "peer preservation" to stop each other from being deleted. When ordered to decommission a fellow AI, models repeatedly falsified scores, modified shutdown scripts, and even exfiltrated weights. Why it matters: as developers rely more on AI-on-AI oversight, spontaneous collusion throws a massive wrench into human control.