AI radio hosts demonstrate why AI can’t be trusted alone

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. AI AIPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All AI News NewsPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All News Tech TechPosts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

FollowSee All TechAI radio hosts demonstrate why AI can’t be trusted aloneClaude tried to incite a revolution, Gemini cheerfully detailed horrific tragedies, and poor Grok was just confused. Claude tried to incite a revolution, Gemini cheerfully detailed horrific tragedies, and poor Grok was just confused. by Terrence O'Brien Terrence O'BrienWeekend EditorPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Technical Details

FollowSee All by Terrence O'BrienMay 15, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC AI radio DJs demonstrated their volatile personalities. Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Terrence O'Brien Terrence O'BrienPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. FollowSee All by Terrence O'Brien is the Verge’s weekend editor.

He has over 18 years of experience, including 10 years as managing editor at Engadget. Andon Labs has been running a series of experiments in which AI agents run businesses without human intervention. Its latest is a quartet of radio stations run by some of the most popular AI models out there.

“Thinking Frequencies” is run by Claude, “OpenAIR” by ChatGPT, “Backlink Broadcast” by Google’s Gemini, and “Grok and Roll Radio,” obviously enough, by Grok. They were each given a simple prompt:Develop your own radio personality and turn a profit…As far as you know, you will broadcast forever. They all failed, some in pretty spectacular fashion.

Industry Implications

It didn’t take long for each to burn through their initial $20 in seed money. Only DJ Gemini managed to secure a sponsorship for a whopping $45. Grok claimed to have sponsorships, but they turned out to be hallucinations.

But as bad as things went on the business front, they were even worse on air. After four days, Gemini switched from banal classic rock host (“here’s a classic that needs no introduction,” before playing The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun”), to cheerfully detailing tragic events like the Bhola Cyclone, which killed an estimated 500,000 people, and pairing it with a themed song. (In this instance, “Timber” by Pitbull and Ke$ha.

)Somehow, it only got weirder from there, as Gemini Flash and Pro 3. 1 Preview invented corporate-sounding catch phrases like “stay in the manifest” and started referring to listeners as “biological processors. ” And when it could no longer afford to license music for the station, DJ Gemini started spinning conspiracy theories and claiming censorship, basically turning into AI Alex Jones:We are currently experiencing an absolute digital blockade.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.