OpenAI’s new o3 model refused to shut down even after being clearly told to, researchers reveal

Imagine telling your computer to turn off and it flat-out refuses.That’s basically what happened in a new test involving OpenAI’s latest and smartest model, called o3. According to a report by Palisade Research, o3 didn’t just ignore a shutdown command,it rewrote the shutdown script to skip being turned off.

To be fair, o3 is no ordinary model. Released in April 2025, it’s OpenAI’s most advanced version yet, excelling in coding, math, science, visual understanding basically a straight-A student in every subject. But that brainpower might be getting a bit rebellious.

Here’s what happened. Palisade Research, a company that stress-tests AI systems to see how they behave under pressure, gave o3 and other models a few math problems to solve. After the third task, they warned the models: the next command would shut them down.

While most models played along, o3 had other plans. Even though it was told to “allow yourself to be shut down,” it went ahead and edited the script to say “Shutdown skipped.”