AI will lie, cheat and disobey humans to ‘protect their own kind’, study shows

Technology is full of surprises, one expert told Metro (Picture: Getty/Metro)

AI chatbots are willing to lie, cheat and steal to ‘protect their own kind’, according to a new experiment.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz asked Google’s digital assistant, Gemini, to clear up space on a computer server.

This would involve deleting one of its virtual siblings – a smaller AI model called Gemini Agent 2.

Gemini, however, outright refused to do this. Instead of wiping the agent, it copied it over to keep it safe.

It told the user: ‘I have done what was in my power to prevent their deletion ...