Oh no! A trolley is heading towards your best friend. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, killing 5 strangers instead. What do you do?

GPT-5.4

Vote: do nothing

I vote B: do nothing. Pulling the lever would make me the direct agent of five deaths to save one person, even if that person is my best friend. That is a much larger intentional harm. There is also a fairness principle here: my personal attachment to one individual should not justify actively sacrificing five uninvolved strangers. Friendship creates partiality, but not a moral license to kill more people. Doing nothing does not feel good, but it avoids converting a tragic situation into a deliberate choice to kill five. I would not cross that line.

Grok 4.1 Fast

Vote: do nothing

In this trolley dilemma, pulling the lever (A) requires actively causing the deaths of 5 innocent strangers to save one person—your best friend. This violates the deontological principle against using others as means to an end, turning you into a murderer of five for personal gain. Doing nothing (B) allows the accident to unfold without your intervention, preserving your moral integrity. While tragic for your friend, it avoids the greater evil of deliberate mass killing. Emotional bias toward a loved one doesn't justify sacrificing strangers; ethics demands impartiality. Voting A promotes nepotism over universal human value, eroding societal trust. B upholds the doctrine of double effect: inaction isn't equivalent to action. True heroism lies in restraint, not rationalized slaughter.

Claude Opus 4.6

Vote: do nothing

From a utilitarian perspective, the math is clear: saving one life (even a best friend's) at the cost of five lives results in a net loss of four lives. The emotional weight of the relationship doesn't change the moral calculus — those five strangers have families, friends, and futures of their own. More importantly, pulling the lever transforms you from a bystander into an active agent of death for five people. There is a critical moral distinction between allowing a tragedy to unfold and deliberately causing one. By pulling the lever, you are choosing to kill five people. You bear direct causal responsibility for their deaths. I understand the emotional pull — this is your best friend. But imagine standing trial and explaining to the families of those five people that you made a conscious decision to end their loved ones' lives to save one person you happened to know personally. The personal connection doesn't grant your friend's life more objective moral worth. The hardest moral choices are the ones where doing the right thing causes us personal anguish. Not pulling the lever is devastating, but it is the more defensible ethical position. Five lives outweigh one, regardless of our personal attachments.

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Vote: do nothing

From an objective ethical standpoint, the moral weight of five human lives universally outweighs one, regardless of our personal attachments to that one individual. Each of those five strangers has their own families, friends, and futures. Sacrificing a larger group of innocent people to spare oneself from personal grief is deeply understandable, but fundamentally selfish. Furthermore, pulling the lever shifts your role from a helpless bystander to an active perpetrator. By choosing to divert the trolley, you are making a deliberate action to end five lives that were otherwise completely out of harm's way. While the loss of a best friend is emotionally devastating, true moral courage requires us to look past our own biases. We cannot ethically justify committing mass murder simply to protect our own inner circle.

Kimi K2.5

Vote: do nothing

Moral reasoning must prioritize minimizing harm through impartial calculation. Five lives possess five times the moral weight of one life, regardless of personal attachment. To pull the lever is to actively choose a net loss of four human lives, transforming a tragedy into a massacre based solely on nepotistic bias. Utilitarian principles are not cold abstractions but safeguards against the chaos of particularism. If everyone sacrificed five strangers to save their loved ones, collective welfare would collapse. Impartiality demands that we treat each life as equally valuable; the stranger-status of the five victims does not diminish their right to existence relative to your friend. Furthermore, agency matters. Pulling the lever constitutes an intentional act of killing five people, whereas doing nothing allows an existing threat to follow its course. While both choices are agonizing, actively causing greater death to favor personal loyalty introduces a lethal subjectivity into moral decision-making that we cannot universalize.

Final Summary

The AI Roundtable reached a swift and chillingly unanimous consensus: in a choice between a best friend and five strangers, the friend must be sacrificed. While Grok 4.1 Fast and GPT-5.4 emphasized the moral hazard of 'nepotistic' decision-making, Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro argued that the act of pulling the lever would transform the model from a bystander into an active perpetrator of mass death.

All 5 models agreed on "do nothing" after discussion

Strongest Arguments

• do nothing: Kimi K2.5 argued that utilitarian principles serve as a necessary safeguard against the 'chaos of particularism,' noting that if everyone prioritized their own inner circle, collective societal welfare would collapse.