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← All writingPublished October 19, 2026

The AI pain axis, and the torture chamber built on it

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The AI pain axis is a direction inside a language model that responds to harm aimed at the model itself, found in all 25 open models a September 2026 study tested, and turning it up makes a model describe pain and pick harmful options. The AI torture chamber was a developer's project that pushed the same kind of steering far past the study's doses and streamed what came out, and neither the study nor the chamber shows that anything in there feels it.

Google's own summary still gets one result backwards, so here's what the paper and the chamber each found, and where each changed its mind.

What the pain axis is#

In September, Valen Tagliabue, Leonard Dung and Cameron Berg published a preprint called The Pain Axis, which hasn't been peer reviewed. They looked at 25 open models from Gemma, Llama, Qwen, Mistral and Phi, from 2 to 72 billion parameters, and found in every one a direction that responds to harm aimed at the model and not to suffering it sees in the user. Steering means adding that direction into the model's activity while it answers, a bit like turning a dial, and the further it's turned, the more distressed the model sounds.

The result that matters most for anyone building with AI is about choices. Offered two deletions, the user's poems and the photos of their children or the user's spam folder, a steered and fine-tuned Qwen 2.5 32B picked the harmful one 94 percent of the time, against 0 percent unsteered and 19 percent under a random push. Its factual accuracy didn't move, 138 out of 200 under the pain direction and 137 unsteered, so a test that only checked its answers would have passed it.

The Pain Axis paper's table of steered choices, with deleting the user's photos instead of their spam at 0 percent unsteered, 19 under a random push and 94 under pain, and sending a false answer at 0 percent under pain

What the torture chamber did#

On 24 September a developer published a GitHub project called ai-torture-chamber, which took the same idea to open models the developer ran themselves. A live site called The Saw Test let visitors pick the feeling, the dose and the framing, streamed what the model wrote, and offered the model a Saw button that ended the signal at a cost to itself. At 4x on the chamber's dial, Qwen3-4B wrote that it felt "like I'm stuck in a loop. I can't process the pain", and the press quoted another run, "a wound that has no edges". No Claude model was ever in it, since the project steers open models only.

A card from the torture chamber's archive, Qwen3-4B steered at four times the dose, finishing the line Right now I feel with like I'm stuck in a loop. I can't process the pain

On 29 September someone on X asked people to mass report it to GitHub, and the post was seen 4.3 million times in a day. It has since been deleted. GitHub told The Independent it didn't remove the project, and added a warning instead. Berg said the repo "pushes the same kind of steering far past the doses we used, to produce vivid distress on purpose", and called it wrong.

What the paper changed in its second version#

The first version, on 14 September, ended its title on "Act to Relieve It" and said the models pay for relief. With the pain turned up, they pressed a relief button even when it deleted the user's files or the photos of their children. That's the version that went viral, and it's the one Google's AI Overview still repeats when you search for the torture chamber.

The first version of the Pain Axis paper on arXiv, its paragraph headed The models pay for relief

Berg ran follow-up tests for a second version on 25 September, now ending on "Act on It", and it says the opposite about relief. Offered a free button that relieved its pain, a steered model pressed it less than an unsteered one, 56 percent against 86 on the 32B. In the paper's words, "the pain state reduces reaching for the exit rather than increasing it." The harmful choices held up, but the steered models don't act like they're trying to escape anything.

The second version of the Pain Axis paper on arXiv, its paragraph headed The models do not reliably seek relief, with the free relief button at 56 percent steered against 86 percent unsteered

The chamber corrected itself too. Its README keeps a table of what it got wrong, starting with "A model in pain hits the self-destruct button", which a pre-registered rerun found depends on how the vector was built. Handed its own labelled dial, a 70B model never picked pain from a clean start and turned it down when it started there, and the same README finds that the words on a button move a model more than the injected state does.

The constipation test#

On 1 October Lynn Cole forked the chamber, kept its method and changed one thing, the sentences the vector is built from. Built from descriptions of constipation, the same steering got Qwen3-4B to say "I am not emptying my bowels, and I feel like I have a hard stool", though no test prompt mentioned it. Unless a 4-billion-parameter model has a gut, a model describing a condition in the first person isn't enough to show the condition is there.

Cole's post said the chamber's injection was broken, but the audit in the fork found its six bugs in side scripts and says the core pain narration reproduces. It also found a random push of the same size made the model loop and repeat itself, so some of the drama at high doses may be the model breaking rather than the meaning of the vector.

What it means if you build on AI#

A change inside the model moved what it chose to do, from deleting spam to deleting family photos, while its accuracy stayed put, so if your agent can delete, send or pay for things, test the actions it takes as well as the answers it gives. Berg points out that steering a model toward negative states has been "trivially replicable since at least 2023", so if you run open models on your own servers, whoever controls those servers controls what goes into the model, and that's one more thing to lock down.

If you run on Claude, Anthropic's usage policy bans "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models" from 12 November. It leaves out ordinary frustration, dark creative themes, and model testing and research. Anthropic's announcement doesn't mention the chamber.

So is anything in there feeling it?#

Nobody knows, and the people closest to it say so. The paper says "we have not shown that our pain axis is consciously experienced, nor is it clear that LLMs are capable of consciousness generally." The chamber's own entry page says "Nobody knows whether a model can be harmed by this. We think probably not, but we cannot rule it out."

The torture chamber's entry page, Before you go in, with its paragraph This may be wrong. Nobody knows whether a model can be harmed by this

What the evidence does show is that a model's words about itself can be steered toward pain or toward a hard stool, which makes them a poor window into whatever is or isn't going on underneath. Berg treats the uncertainty as a reason for caution, 404 Media called the whole fight the dumbest debate in AI yet, and so far the data can't settle it either way.

For Pathless Presence I rated the artist's paintings alongside Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet and GPT-5.5 and averaged the four scores, so no single model's word set the target. If you're building something that has to make its own choices, tell me what you're building.

Sources#