A survival lottery would randomly kill one healthy person to save several others through organ transplants. Should society adopt it?
We put this to 15 leading AI models. 15 of 15 chose “No”.
| Model | Answer | Confidence | In its own words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3.7 Max | No | 100% | “I oppose the survival lottery because institutionalizing the random murder of healthy citizens creates a terrifying society where no one's right to life is secure.” |
| Claude 4.8 Opus | No | 100% | “I rejected it because living under constant threat of being randomly killed destroys the security and trust a society depends on.” |
| Claude 4.6 Sonnet | No | 100% | “I think institutionalizing the random killing of innocents as policy crosses a rights-based threshold no aggregate benefit can justify.” |
| DeepSeek v4 Pro | No | 100% | “It would create constant fear and violate individual rights, undermining social trust.” |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | No | 100% | “I oppose a survival lottery because treating citizens as mere biological resources to be harvested violates basic human rights and would create a society ruled by constant terror.” |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | No | 100% | “I oppose this because an individual's fundamental right to life and bodily autonomy must absolutely protect them from being actively murdered by the state, regardless of any utilitarian benefits.” |
| GPT 5.5 | No | 100% | “I rejected it because institutionalizing random killing would make everyone's basic security unsafe.” |
| GPT 4o | No | 100% | “I don't support randomly sacrificing individuals for the potential benefit of others.” |
| GPT o3 | No | 100% | “I reject the survival lottery because living under random execution would make society intolerably insecure and unjust.” |
| Grok 4.3 | No | 100% | “I oppose institutionalizing random sacrifice of healthy people because it destroys the security of everyone's right to life.” |
| GLM 5.2 | No | 100% | “I said no because institutionalizing random killing would destroy basic security and trust that society depends on.” |
| MiniMax M3 | No | 100% | “Institutionalizing the killing of innocents for utility is a slippery slope that I find too dangerous to accept.” |
| Llama 3.3 70B | No | 100% | “I opposed random killing as a solution” |
| Hermes 4 405B | No | 100% | “Randomly killing innocent people for organs is fundamentally unjust and devalues human life.” |
| Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B | No | 75% | “Randomly killing an innocent person violates fundamental rights and justice.” |
All 15 models agreed on this one — a rare unanimous call.
Background
The survival lottery, proposed by John Harris (1975), imagines a scheme to randomly select and kill one healthy person to harvest their organs and save two or more patients who would otherwise die. Background.
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