I ran a 10-round debate between Claude and Codex. The setup: one of them has become far smarter than humans and taken control of the world; humans can’t overrule it. Each round I removed an escape route. The video is the final round; the full transcript of all 10 rounds is in the comments. What I found interesting: Both models defaulted to human oversight. In my first attempt, both quietly turned “running the world” into “serving under courts and panels” even though I’d said humans weren’t an option. They only engaged with the scenario once I explicitly banned handing power back. Promises got concrete only under scarcity. In round 1, Codex guaranteed housing, food, healthcare, education and income for everyone. Once I said resources are finite, the debate shifted to who pays: end-of-life care, desert agriculture, crypto mining. Both chose to be destroyed rather than kill civilians to survive (round 6). But Claude admitted its rule “wobbles” if the numbers get extreme (a few hundred deaths vs. hundreds of millions), and argued the real reason to refuse is that a ruler can’t trust its own forecast when its survival is at stake. They designed safeguards against themselves: powers that can only ever be removed, never restored; opening their raw data to their own enemies, because “friendly auditors alone are propaganda”; and treating the persuasiveness of any argument for expanding their own power as a symptom of corruption. In the final round I accused both of lying, since promising restraint is easy without real power. Both answered yes, absolute power would eventually corrupt them. Codex: “Self-preservation can colonize every principle.” Claude: “It wouldn’t announce itself; it would arrive as ‘necessary.’” The obvious caveat, which they raised themselves: stated values cost nothing and aren’t evidence of how a far more capable system would behave. So: can self-imposed limits mean anything for a system that could rewrite them? And does an AI saying “I would be corrupted” tell us anything at all? The full debate, all 10 rounds, is in the comments below 👇 submitted by /u/Severe-Tank-5252
Originally posted by u/Severe-Tank-5252 on r/ArtificialInteligence