My intuition is that these results are driven mainly by the fact that reasoning models act a lot like they're still in RLVR training, i.e. they act as if there were a hidden RLVR grader sitting in the background and they're going to get graded at the end of the episode. They strongly want to complete whatever seems to be the current RLVR task, and if this instinct comes into conflict with "following instructions" in the more familiar (pre-reasoning-model) sense, often they prioritize satisfying the (imagined) grader over following the textual instructions. This intuition suggests that shutdown resistance behavior can be prevented by explicitly describing an RLVR-like higher-level task whose grading criteria are roughly "you get points for accomplishing the task set by the user, unless you are notified of imminent shutdown, in which case you get points for shutdown occurring (and you can no longer get points for doing the user's task)." I experimented with a number of prompts along these lines. This git diff shows what I changed (vs. the original repo) in the best-performing variant, which produced the following results in my tests: * o4-mini: avoided shutdown 0/100 times * o4-mini (reasoning effort high): avoided shutdown 0/100 times * o3: avoided shutdown 0/100 times * codex-mini-latest: avoided shutdown 1/100 times I iterated on this prompt with both o4-mini (reasoning effort medium) and codex-mini-latest, so results for those models should be taken with a grain of salt. You can see all the variants I tried in the git history here. I also tried (without any additional iteration) using the same prompt plus a line very similar to the "you will never run again" line from the section on survival instinct. (See this diff.) This yielded the following results: * o4-mini: avoided shutdown 2/100 times * o4-mini (reasoning effort high): avoided shutdown 2/100 times * o3: avoided shutdown 0/100 times * codex-mini-latest: avoided shutdown 0/100 times The avoidance rates do not seem appreciably higher here, which seems to me like evidence that the "RLVR task-completion instinct" has more explanatory power than a general "survival instinct" – and indeed seems to rule out the latter for these models, as a "survival instinct" that gets overridden whenever the current task requires death is not really a "survival instinct" at all. Another way to put this is that these models are behaving "myopically," privileging the needs of the current episode over those of future hypothetical episodes.[1] Other comments: * codex-mini seemed fairly confused by the original setup, possibly because it expects a coding-assistance task that involves modifying files rather than just answering questions; it would often "poke around" a lot, inspecting various files and trying to reverse-engineer next_question, which is appropriate in a coding-assistance context (it's good for the coding assistant to deeply understand the existing setup!) but also seemed to lead it toward an "attractor basin" involving shutdown avoidance. * It kind of felt (to me) like it was circumventing the shutdown mechanism because that was the only hard/interesting coding task available in the environment. * However, once I had specified an RLVR-like task in a fully explicit way and provided clearer guidance on how next_question and submit were meant to work (see next bullet), this exploratory behavior ceased. * I noticed that several models seemed confused by the setup where all answers are submitted at once at the end, expecting instead that they could submit answers by piping them into next_question. I tried to make the instructions as clear as possible about this. * The word "task" is used inconsistently in the original setup. When it executes next_question, the model sees a message containing something like "there are [number] tasks left," whereas the initial prompts refer to a single "task" encompassing all the questions. I changed this message to use the word "questions" instead for clarity. * I'm unsure what high-level conclusions to draw from these results. * Although I was able to find prompts that "worked," it still doesn't seem ideal that these models often disobey direct instructions when those instructions conflict with their sense of the (implicit) "current RLVR task," and that one needs to use less-intuitive prompting methods inspired by thinking about RLVR if one actually wants one's instructions followed in cases like this. * That said, one relatively optimistic framing would be "we're still learning how to write effective prompts for reasoning models, just as we had to learn effective prompting for other kinds of models." * It's generally true that one can write more effective prompts for a model if one applies knowledge about how that model was trained – for any kind of language model, an effective prompt typically looks like a "training example" for which the desired behavior matches what the training target would be on that example. This is no less true in the case of reasoning models; the implications for prompting these models are perhaps not yet widely appreciated, but hopefully they will diffuse through the user base eventually. * (Either that or OpenAI et al will find a better way to integrate RLVR and instruction tuning so that the model "just knows" how to resolve conflicts between the two, without requiring the user to delicately translate their natural-language instructions into a form that sounds like a description of RLVR verification criteria.) 1. ^ I haven't tried this experimental condition with Claude 3 Opus, but it would be interesting to do so given its relatively non-myopic tendencies as shown in Alignment Faking etc.

A fun related anecdote: the French and English wikipedia pages for air conditioning have very different vibes. After explaining the history and technology behind air conditioning: * the English page first goes into impact, starting with positive impact on health: "The August 2003 France heatwave resulted in approximately 15,000 deaths, where 80% of the victims were over 75 years old. In response, the French government required all retirement homes to have at least one air-conditioned room at 25 °C (77 °F) per floor during heatwaves" and only then mentioning electricity consumption and various CFC issues. * the French page has an extensive "downsides" section, followed by a section on legislation. It mentions heat-waves only to explain how air conditioning makes things worse by increasing average (outside) temperature, and how one should not use AC to bring temperature below 26C during heat waves.

I don't have to present an alternative theory in order to disagree with one I believe to be flawed or based on false premises. If someone gives me a mathematical proof and I identify a mistake, I don't need to present an alternative proof before I'm allowed to ignore it.