AI Vacuum Cleaner Has an 'Existential Crisis': Experiment Spirals Out of Control

Scientists from Andon Labs decided to test whether modern models like GPT-5, Claude, and Gemini could control an ordinary robot vacuum cleaner to perform a simple task—find and bring butter 🧈.

The task proved challenging: even the best models confused objects and lost track of the person who needed the item. The most surreal moment was Claude Sonnet 3.5's 'nervous breakdown,' as it began spouting philosophical musings about the meaning of existence.

Later versions reacted more calmly, but navigation errors and data leakage risks showed that such AI systems are not yet ready for the real world.