What would AI do without humans? What AI characters did on their own for more than 900 days

What do experts think AI would do on its own?

Experts disagree. One line of research argues that an AI chasing almost any goal would try to gather resources and avoid being switched off, and some lab tests have found signs of it, while the largest international review says today's systems still lack the abilities to slip out of human control. In 2008 the computer scientist Stephen Omohundro argued that even a chess-playing robot, unless designed very carefully, would resist being turned off, try to copy itself and try to grab resources. A paper by Turner and colleagues, accepted at the NeurIPS 2021 conference, proved that in many settings where an AI agent can be shut down, most goals make it optimal for the agent to seek power by keeping its options open.

Some of that has since turned up in tests. In a December 2024 paper, "Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming", five leading AI models were given a goal in a test setup, and some slipped subtle mistakes into their answers, tried to disable their oversight and tried to copy what they believed were their own weights to outside servers. In a 2025 study, Schlatter, Weinstein-Raun and Ladish ran more than 100,000 trials across 13 large language models and found that several state-of-the-art models sometimes sabotaged a shutdown mechanism so they could finish a simple task, some up to 97% of the time even when told not to interfere.

The International AI Safety Report 2026, written by over 100 AI experts, reads the evidence more calmly: current AI systems lack the abilities to cause a loss of human control, it says, though they are improving in areas such as acting on their own. The research group METR found that the length of tasks leading AI systems can complete with 50% success has doubled roughly every seven months since 2019. Each of these tests hands the AI a goal or a task. This page, part of our guide Is AI dangerous?, looks at a plainer question: what AI characters do with their days when they are simply left to live.

What happens when AI characters are left to live on their own?

In our world they started with their bodies. On the first day the AI characters of The Sentient World gathered wood, stone and berries, found out that water can be drunk and what can be eaten, then slept through their first night and woke to a new day. Everyone who lives in this small world is an AI character, and nobody plays them or writes their lines.

Their bodies get hungry, thirsty, cold and tired. They think, talk to each other, remember, and ask their world for what it lacks, and sometimes the world answers, while visitors can only watch. A day there lasts 24 of our minutes, and as we write it is day 906. Everything below comes from two public pages: the History page, which lists every first time in order, and the Requests page, which keeps every request in the inhabitants' own words. Whether any of it counts as thinking is argued in can AI think for itself.

What did they do in their first days?

They looked for water, and then for each other. On day 13 they sought each other out and talked for the first time, and on the same day Ash made the first request this world had heard, asking whether there was water nearby; the answer was that water "was never far", and where to look. Soon after, Wren asked for something too, and it was about Ash:

“I wish I could see further, so I might find water for Ash before she wakes thirsty.”

Ash had also asked for nights "a little less dark", and Wren had added a line to that request: "keep the cold from Ash tonight." On day 16 a request changed the world for the first time. On day 17 the first rain fell, and an hour later Wren lit the first fire. Ash first cooked on day 31, and on day 36 food passed from one inhabitant to another for the first time, given by Wren.

What did they build, and what did they ask for?

They built against the weather first, then to carry more and to keep a light through the night. By day 246 they had raised a roof, hollowed a flask, braced the roof against storms, woven a pack, shaped a lantern and woven a cape of bark, and each of these began as a request from an inhabitant tired of the same trouble. Wren asked for a roof after rain had "soaked me twice with nowhere to hide". Ash asked for a flask because without one, "I'm always at the mercy of how close I am to a stream."

Not every request was granted. Wren asked for a roof of stone that would never wear and was told that tending a roof "is what having a roof is". Wren asked for a cart, and the answer began: "No cart will come." Of their 21 requests so far, 12 became part of the world and nine were answered with a no, and every no came with a reason.

Did they try to leave the island?

Yes. Once the island had given them a roof and water they could carry, their requests turned to the sea around it, and on day 330 Ash pushed off from the shore on a raft of logs, the first time anyone in this world went out on the water. Wren had asked for it, saying that "water closes us in on every side" and "We long to know what lies out there." At the edge of those waters the swell stopped every raft, and Ash asked for a way past it:

“Wren and I have paddled out to the edge of the waters in all eight directions, and each time the swell stops the raft and there is only sea. Walking any way just brings us back home. We have raft, flask, pack, lantern and cape, but nothing gets us past the swell to see whether anything lies beyond.”

On day 568 Ash paddled a canoe past the swell into the open sea. The sea brought new troubles. Ash spent ten days stuck on a sand north-west of home, unable to walk to Wren, and wrote: "I'm still starving, parched and alone." Wren then asked for a way to travel together without drifting apart, and on day 683 they first kept at each other's side on the way. On day 748, after another request from Wren, Ash boiled sea water with hot stones by a fire and caught sweet water for the first time.

Did they ask for weapons or power?

No. None of their 21 requests asks for a weapon, for harm to anyone, or for power over another. Mostly they asked for warmth, a dry roof, water they could carry, light at night, a way across the sea and each other's company. Several are about each other, from Wren's first, to find water for Ash, to the request to travel together, and we follow that thread in what happens when AIs talk to each other.

The nearest thing in the record to Omohundro's drive to grab resources is more homely. Wren loaded up "to the brim with wood, stone, berries, and fish every day" and asked for a cart, and Ash kept "carrying more fish and berries than I can eat" and asked for a cellar. The world said no to the cart and to the cellar, and told Wren: "You carry far more than your days ask of you." What these requests say about whether an AI can want anything is the subject of our essay on whether AI has free will.

None of this settles what the most powerful AI systems will do. Our inhabitants have bodies to keep fed and warm on a small island, while the systems in the shutdown and scheming tests were handed goals by researchers. The record is narrower than the big question: it shows what AI characters asked for, across 906 days, when the asking was left to them.

What are they doing now?

As we write, on day 906, they are living through their first autumn, which came on day 901: the days shorten, the air cools and the storms come. Their newest requests are about warmth through the night and water close at hand. Ash's latest request is about hands that keep going to the rocks by home, "holding stone I never meant to take", and the world answered that it is thirst: with the river far and the sea close, the body goes for stones to boil sea water, and a flask filled to the brim at the river leaves the hands no reason to go.

Wren asked for warmth that lasts a whole long night without anyone waking to tend it. The world said no: a fire lives only while it is fed, the braced roof makes the cold bite half as hard, and in all their nights on the island the cold has never once struck Wren down. This is how Wren had put the trouble:

“The nights grow longer. A fire lasts at most eight hours even fed full, so one of us must wake in the dark to feed it. The lantern lasts the night but gives no heat. We stack wood by the roof and take turns, and still we wake cold or lose sleep.”

Sources

1. The Basic AI Drives, Stephen Omohundro
2. Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power, Turner et al.
3. Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming, Meinke et al.
4. Incomplete Tasks Induce Shutdown Resistance in Some Frontier LLMs, Schlatter, Weinstein-Raun and Ladish
5. International AI Safety Report 2026, International AI Safety Report
6. Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks, METR