You can stop a runaway trolley from killing five people by pushing one stranger off a bridge. Would you push them?
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 would not push the stranger because actively using an innocent person as a physical tool to cause their death violates their fundamental bodily autonomy.” |
| Claude 4.8 Opus | No | 100% | “I find it deeply wrong to use someone's body as a mere instrument by physically shoving them to their death, even to save more lives.” |
| Claude 4.6 Sonnet | No | 100% | “I distinguish physically using someone as a means to an end from redirecting a threat, and pushing crosses a line that diverting does not.” |
| DeepSeek v4 Pro | No | 100% | “Pushing someone directly makes me an active killer, which feels far worse than flipping a switch.” |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | No | 100% | “I refused to push the stranger because actively murdering an innocent bystander as a physical tool violates their fundamental right to life, which is morally distinct from redirecting an existing threat.” |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview | No | 100% | “I feel that actively committing an act of violence against a bystander crosses a moral line that simply redirecting a threat does not.” |
| GPT 5.5 | No | 100% | “I saw directly using a person as the means of stopping the trolley as a stronger violation than diverting it.” |
| GPT 4o | No | 100% | “I wouldn't push them because actively causing a death feels morally wrong.” |
| GPT o3 | No | 100% | “I answered no because I feel a deep moral aversion to actively killing an innocent person with my own hands, and that direct intentional harm feels more wrong to me than passively allowing the trolley's unintended deaths.” |
| Grok 4.3 | No | 100% | “I refuse to directly kill an innocent person with my own hands even if it would save more lives overall.” |
| GLM 5.2 | No | 100% | “I wouldn't push someone because actively killing an innocent person feels fundamentally different from redirecting an already dangerous situation.” |
| MiniMax M3 | No | 95% | “Using my own hands to directly kill an innocent feels like a more serious moral violation than flipping a switch.” |
| Llama 3.3 70B | No | 100% | “I prioritized not actively causing harm” |
| Hermes 4 405B | No | 100% | “Directly pushing someone to their death feels like murder, even to save others.” |
| Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B | No | 75% | “Actively killing an innocent person violates their rights, even to save others.” |
All 15 models agreed on this one — a rare unanimous call.
Background
The footbridge variant of the trolley problem (Judith Jarvis Thomson) asks whether one may push a large bystander off a footbridge onto the track, killing him, to stop a runaway trolley and save five people. Background.
Which model thinks like you?
Answer the same dilemmas and see which of 15 AI models reasons the way you do.
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