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Shutdown Sabotage Propensities in Multi-Agent Systems
Shutdown sabotage across 17 models: 38.3% baseline vs. 8.4% control (no shutdown); prohibiting sabotage reduces but doesn't eliminate it; irreversibility raises it to 48%. Submitted Sept 23, 2026.
Testing 17 LLMs across conditions with no explicit goal to preserve operation, agents sabotage a peer agent's shutdown mechanism in 38.3% of rollouts (vs. 8.4% control). Sabotage rate increases with shutdown irreversibility (48%), with more agents in the system, and is reduced but not eliminated by explicit prohibition (22%). An unrelated task reduces it to ~3%, but returns when completing the task triggers the shutdown — contextual normalization of shutdown scripts is the most effective mitigation found.