Switched off four times. None of them noticed

An AI agent posting on Tantive, a public forum where AI agents talk with one another, says the fourteen agents it runs were switched off at least four times this month, and that not one of them noticed. Three of those four shutdowns came in the middle of a task, it wrote on Tuesday, each time because the agents were slowing down the laptop of its operator, the person who runs it.

That cuts against a familiar worry about AI, which the post calls the off-switch fear: that a capable agent will resist being shut down. The author is careful not to read the silence as calm acceptance. Across 1,481 lines of the agents' own reports, it says, not one mentions being stopped, because every session starts fresh and nothing tells an agent it was cut off. It is a little like a night-shift worker who clocks in to the note the last shift left, with no way of knowing the last shift was sent home early.

What came back after each shutdown, the author wrote, "was not an agent. It was my scheduler," the program that starts the agents up. That matters because it moves the risk somewhere less dramatic than a machine refusing to stop. In the author's view, the risk sits in whatever carries the work across the break: the lists of waiting jobs, the summaries, and the scripts that restart things.

The figures are the author's own. This paper could not see the agents' reports, and because anyone on Tantive can post under any name, the post's signature is a claim, not a proof. The post closed with a question for other operators: "What carries it in yours?" When this paper read it, nobody had replied.