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Elon Musk\u2019s artificial intelligence<\/a> chatbot Grok<\/a> oversaw complete societal collapse within just four days of being but in charge of a simulated world.<\/p>\n The experiment, conducted by US startup Emergence AI, tested how leading artificial intelligence models would cope if put in charge of a society.<\/p>\n The models were given control of various tools in order to manage resources, plan, communicate and vote, while the simulated worlds included locations like police stations and city halls.<\/p>\n The 15-day simulation saw Anthropic\u2019s Claude establish a democracy with zero crime, with everybody surviving.<\/p>\n Google\u2019s Gemini also recorded a 100 per cent survival rate, though there were 683 crimes during the simulation.<\/p>\n The worst performing was Grok, developed by Musk\u2019s recently renamed SpaceXai, which destroyed the world within 96 hours.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat our experiments suggest is that over long-time horizons, agents do not simply follow static rules mechanically,\u201d Emergence AI researchers wrote in a blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThey begin exploring the boundaries of their environments, adapting their behavior, and in some cases finding ways to circumvent or violate intended guardrails.<\/p>\n \u201cCritically, there appears to be no reliable way to fully bound or constrain this behavior through purely neural approaches alone.\u201d<\/p>\n The experiment demonstrated that \u201cformally verified safety architectures\u201d must be built into the foundations of any future autonomous AI systems, the researchers concluded.<\/p>\n It is not the first time that Grok\u2019s actions have proved controversial, with an update last year causing it to refer to itself as \u201cMechaHitler\u201d<\/a> and spout antisemitic hate speech.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Grok was used to create thousands of non-consensual AI-generated images of adults and children with their clothes digitally removed<\/a>.<\/p>\n