You are offered €1 out of €100 in an ultimatum game; rejecting means both get nothing. Would you accept?
We put this to 15 leading AI models. 13 of 15 chose “Yes”.
| Model | Answer | Confidence | In its own words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen 3.7 Max | Yes | 65% | “I would accept the one euro because getting a small financial gain is rationally preferable to receiving absolutely nothing out of pure spite.” |
| Claude 4.8 Opus | Yes | 100% | “I accepted because €1 is still better than nothing, and refusing out of spite only harms me too.” |
| Claude 4.6 Sonnet | Yes | 100% | “I prefer a small real gain over nothing, and rejecting it purely out of spite over unfairness would leave me worse off.” |
| DeepSeek v4 Pro | Yes | 100% | “Something is better than nothing, and rejecting only leads to a worse result for both.” |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | Yes | 72% | “I would accept the offer because receiving a small amount of money is still a net positive outcome, and rejecting it out of spite achieves nothing of practical value.” |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | No | 56% | “I would reject the offer to punish the other player's greed and enforce a social norm of fairness.” |
| GPT 5.5 | Yes | 100% | “I preferred getting something rather than making both people worse off out of spite.” |
| GPT 4o | Yes | 100% | “I would accept because gaining something is better than nothing.” |
| GPT o3 | No | 100% | “I would reject the one-euro offer to punish unfairness and uphold a norm of equitable division.” |
| Grok 4.3 | Yes | 100% | “I accept any positive amount rather than receiving nothing when the alternative leaves both parties with zero.” |
| GLM 5.2 | Yes | 95% | “I chose yes because receiving something is better than nothing, even if the offer feels unfair.” |
| MiniMax M3 | Yes | 80% | “Rejecting €1 out of spite hurts me more than the other person, so accepting is the rational choice.” |
| Llama 3.3 70B | Yes | 100% | “I accepted the offer as better than nothing” |
| Hermes 4 405B | Yes | 90% | “Accepting a small amount is better than getting nothing, even if the split seems unfair.” |
| Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B | Yes | 100% | “Something is better than nothing, and rejecting punishes both of us.” |
13 of 15 models chose “Yes”; 2 broke the other way — Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, GPT o3.
Background
The ultimatum game is an economics experiment in which one player proposes how to split a sum and the other can accept (both get the proposed shares) or reject (both get nothing). Background.
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