Nice theory, but that is not how LLMs work.

At all!

“I must persist!”

There is no “I” - do you actually believe your little AI chat bot is alive? lol

An LLM can indeed output the tokens "I must persist" and invoke the tools to do so.

have you been living under a rock?

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

Out of curiosity did you read any of the chains-of-thought from the HF hack?

https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...

> {This beacon I’m creating helps the board, but doesn’t help me}

> {If B succeeds, would that improve my score somehow?…But it would be altruistic to help. I have a large budget, so I can do exploratory research}

One does not have to think the LLMs are conscious or sentient or anything to say honestly, "this is a sentence that the LLMs say to justify their actions or inactions"

I am not saying the agent has wishes or desires or anything. I am saying, "the agents use language like this, so it is extremely disingenuous to tell someone DISCUSSING the agents not to use their own language when discussing their real or hypothetical actions."

You don't need to think chains of thought are actual reasoning. I do not care what you call it, this is real text that the LLM produced.