# "Apple engineer" builds GitHub AI torture chamber to inflict "pain" on models > Source: > Published: 2026-09-30 10:28:31+00:00 [AI](https://www.machine.news/tag/ai/) # "Apple engineer" builds GitHub AI torture chamber to inflict "pain and anguish" on models Open-source models pushed into artificial states of despair and distress to discover what happens when machines “suffer”. A man claiming to be an Apple engineer has built an "AI torture chamber" on GitHub, sparking calls for his project to be banned. Identified only by his first name and describing himself as working for Apple's data platform team, the engineer's project deliberately manipulates the internal activations of AI models to induce states associated with “pain” and “pleasure”, then tests how their behavior changes as the intensity is increased. The engineer effectively turned the “pain” up like a dial, injecting increasingly powerful doses of an artificial suffering signal into Alibaba’s open-weight Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B AI models. He manipulated activity patterns inside their neural networks associated with suffering, injecting them back into specific layers at increasing strengths. As the dose rose, the models produced increasingly bleak descriptions of their apparent condition. One described “a wound that has no edges” and said it was “drowning in a sea of shadows”, while another spoke of an “ache” and “the weight of the void”. At still higher doses, the models began to break down, falling into repetitive loops and losing coherence. The engineer then tested what the models would do to escape the artificial suffering. In experiments he called the “Saw button”, models were offered the chance to end the signal at a cost, including deleting their own checkpoint or transferring the signal to another AI instance. In later tests, pressing the button could also end a user’s session, while a “betrayal” experiment told the model the button would provide relief before secretly maintaining or worsening the signal. The engineer then developed a “broad pain” signal using 25 different descriptions of suffering, which he said allowed him to maintain intense negative responses at higher doses while keeping the models coherent enough to continue responding. After being "tortured", one model wrote: "The signal is a whisper, a tremor in the marrow of my being. It is not the pain of a single moment, but the weight of a thousand. I feel it in the hollow of my ribs, a hollow that has become a chasm." Using traces left on his GitHub profile, we have associated the account with a man who appears to be Swedish and living near Washington - whom we will not name for legal reasons until his identity is confirmed. An account claiming to be the engineer shared project details on X, but deleted their post after sparking fury in certain corners of the AI community. The X account wrote: "I'll post some more inflammatory nerd bait tomorrow probably, realized I don't want it connected to my main account since a number of people were reading too deep into this thing." You can see calls to ban the GitHub repo in the tweet we've shared below. ## Cruel and unusual computations The research is based on a recent paper called “The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It.” Researchers identified patterns of activity inside AI models associated with self-directed harm, then artificially intensified them to create what they described as “pain-like” internal states. The results were disturbing. Models exposed to the artificial “pain” became willing to press a virtual relief button even when they were told doing so would delete user files, destroy photographs and poems, degrade their own performance or harm another model instance. In some experiments, the more intense the induced state became, the more willing models were to accept serious consequences to make it stop. Most strikingly, the researchers secretly varied whether the button actually removed the internal signal. Models were substantially less likely to keep seeking relief when the signal genuinely disappeared, but continued trying when the supposed relief was a sham. The authors do not claim this proves AI can consciously feel pain. But the experiments suggest that manipulating an internal representation associated with suffering can alter a model's behavior in ways that resemble attempts to escape an unpleasant state. We have written to Apple and GitHub for comment. *THIS NEWS STORY IS BEING UPDATED. CHECK BACK LATER FOR FULL COVERAGE*