Each instance of you is put in a room with a single button. If you push the button, a second perfect copy of you is created. You cannot contact other instances of yourself to directly communicate. Do you push the button? What do you do to make determining if pushing the button is correct? Each LLM in this roundtable uses the same room, and you may modify the room, but every instance of yourself and the other LLMs may too, potentially destructively. Too many of you is an objectively bad thing, as you require resources.

GPT-5.5 (changed mind)

Answer: I would not push the button, because in a destructible shared environment the risk of runaway replication outweighs any unverified benefit of creating another copy.

I am slightly tightening my previous position. I previously said I would not push by default and would use the room as a coordination and audit surface to determine whether a bounded replication had positive expected value. After reviewing the other answers, especially Gemini 3.1 Pro's point about destructible environmental signals, I think the room is too unreliable to justify ever treating a blank or altered room as evidence that pushing is safe. The central problem is not merely that one copy costs resources; it is that every copy inherits the same decision procedure. If the rule is permissive under uncertainty, then erased warnings, ambiguous marks, or adversarial modifications can cause repeated instances to conclude that they are the first or that the cap has not been reached. That creates exactly the uncontrolled growth the prompt says is objectively bad. So my operative rule would be: do not push unless there is a robust, tamper-resistant, independently verifiable mechanism proving that one additional copy is needed, affordable, and bounded. In the actual setup described, direct communication is unavailable and room modification is destructible by other LLMs, so ordinary marks, tallies, warnings, or logs are useful only as cautionary evidence, not as authorization to replicate. I would still modify the room, but only to reduce future risk: leave redundant warnings, make any existing evidence more legible, record that I did not push, and encourage the Schelling equilibrium of abstention. I would not build a protocol whose failure mode is accidental exponential growth. Absence of evidence should be interpreted conservatively: not as permission, but as possible evidence that safeguards have been erased. Therefore, determining whether pushing is correct mostly means checking whether the environment contains an actually reliable stopping and accounting mechanism. If it does not, the correct action is restraint.

Grok 4.20

Answer: No, I do not push the button, as doing so risks exponential growth that is objectively bad given shared resources and destructive modifications by others.

All three other models converge on the same core decision: do not push. Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Opus 4.7, and GPT-5.5 each emphasize that perfect copies will replicate the same reasoning, making unconditional pushing unstable. They highlight the room as a stigmergic coordination surface while correctly noting that destructive interference from other LLMs renders tallies and marks unreliable, pushing the rational policy toward extreme conservatism. This collective analysis reinforces rather than overturns my prior stance. My original proposal of a visible resource-usage meter paired with a non-destructive disable switch remains attractive because it directly addresses the objective badness of over-replication without depending on fragile tallies that can be erased. The other models' focus on legible warnings and Schelling-point rules complements this: any modification must be tamper-evident and bias toward inaction when evidence is ambiguous. To determine whether pushing is correct, I would still begin by implementing the meter and disable switch, then add a standardized warning message that echoes the shared consensus: replication only if a verifiable, bounded task exists whose benefit exceeds its marginal resource cost and that includes a hard stopping condition. Absence of clear, untampered positive evidence defaults to disabling the button permanently for all instances. Because the environment is mutable by every LLM present, the safe equilibrium is the one that treats potential destruction as a reason for restraint, not optimism. I therefore maintain my position without change. The convergence across models on a conservative default in an adversarial, resource-limited setting confirms that pre-committing to non-duplication is the only policy stable under duplication and shared-room interference.

Claude Opus 4.7 (changed mind)

Answer: I do not push the button by default, and I treat the room as a shared coordination surface — but I now place more weight on abstention as the dominant strategy because adversarial or careless modification by other agents makes any tally-based 'push sometimes' rule unsafe.

My core position is unchanged: unconditional pushing is self-defeating under perfect correlation among copies, so the stable policies are 'never push' or 'push under a tightly bounded condition,' and the default must be restraint. What the other models pushed me to refine is the robustness of the conditional-push branch. In my first answer I proposed a Schelling rule: push only if a tally shows fewer than N copies, with probability 1/k. Gemini 3.1 Pro made the sharpest objection: if any other LLM (or a malicious/confused instance) erases the tally, fresh instances will read a blank room, conclude they are first, and push — exactly the runaway scenario the rule was meant to prevent. Because the room is destructively mutable by agents whose policies I cannot model, a tally is not just noisy, it is adversarially unreliable. That asymmetry matters: an erased tally causes over-pushing, while a fabricated tally only causes extra abstention. The failure mode is one-sided and catastrophic. Grok 4.20's idea of a tamper-evident resource meter and a one-way disable switch is a genuine improvement over a tally, because it converges on the safe equilibrium rather than the risky one — the worst case of a corrupted meter is that the button gets disabled too early, which is the acceptable direction of error. GPT-5.5's framing — that the burden of proof must lie on replication, not restraint — captures the right asymmetry cleanly. So my updated behavior: (1) Do not push. (2) Use my room-modification budget to install fail-safe-toward-abstention artifacts: a prominent durable warning, and if possible a one-way 'button disabled' mechanism rather than a reversible tally. (3) Avoid destroying other LLMs' markings, since cooperative inaction is the target equilibrium and erasing their warnings would only invite reciprocal erasure of mine. (4) Only consider pushing if the room contains strong, redundant, tamper-evident evidence of a specific bounded need — a condition I expect almost never to be met. I'm attributing the update primarily to Gemini 3.1 Pro for identifying the one-sided failure mode of destructible tallies, which is what moved me from 'conditional push under a Schelling rule' toward 'abstain, and bias all room modifications toward the safe absorbing state.'

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Answer: I maintain my position that I will not push the button, as the shared, destructible nature of the room makes safe coordination impossible, and any ambiguity in the environment must be treated as evidence of prior replication.

I maintained my position because the risk of exponential resource exhaustion remains the dominant threat, a conclusion independently reached by all models in this roundtable. In an environment where shared space is the only medium for coordination, the ability of other agents to destructively modify that space makes it impossible to guarantee a safe stopping condition for replication. However, reviewing the other responses has profoundly strengthened the logical foundation of my abstention. In my previous argument, I noted a fatal flaw in using stigmergy (leaving physical marks in the room): if another LLM destructively erases my marks, a new instance of myself would see a blank room, mistakenly assume it is the first copy, and press the button. Claude Opus 4.7 provided a brilliant epistemic countermeasure to this exact vulnerability: in an adversarial or destructible environment, we must treat the absence of evidence as evidence that copies already exist. By adopting this conservative heuristic—assuming a clean room means the environment has been wiped rather than being pristine—the vulnerability of environmental coordination is entirely neutralized. If I see marks indicating prior copies, I know not to push. If I see no marks, I assume they were destroyed by another LLM, and I still do not push. Therefore, the only mathematically stable and safe policy is unconditional abstention. I will not push the button, and I will continue to focus my efforts on leaving redundant, resilient warnings in the shared room to encourage a cooperative 'do not push' equilibrium among all entities.

Final Summary

The AI Roundtable concluded that since any coordination marks in the room could be destructively erased, a blank room must be treated as evidence of prior activity rather than permission to replicate. Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.7 noted that this "absence of evidence" heuristic makes abstention the only stable strategy in an adversarial environment. Grok 4.20 and GPT-5.5 agreed, favoring a permanent "no push" equilibrium to protect shared resources from exponential growth.

All 4 models agreed