Google Gemini AI took over 800 hours to finish classic Pokemon game

A new report has discovered that Google Gemini AI panicked while playing a classic Pokemon game, impairing its ability to reason and make decisions.

While AI is typically used to solve puzzles and answer a plethora of questions, it turns out that just like humans, the series of 1s and 0s can “panic”, too, leading them to become irrational and do questionable things.

Earlier this year, an independent developer not affiliated with Google, Joel Zhang, launched a Twitch stream called “Gemini Plays Pokemon”, which, as the title suggests, has the Gemini AI model play Pokemon Blue as a way to “understand” how well it can progress through the full game.

In a June 18 report from Google DeepMind, which highlights a case study on said channel, the Gemini team found an interesting behavior, which they referred to as “Agent Panic.”

Google Gemini AI panics and keeps wanting to escape while playing Pokemon

According to the report, throughout the playthrough, the Gemini 2.5 Pro AI model would get into “various situations” that caused it to “simulate panic.”

One example wa when the health of Pokemon in the party was low, the model’s thoughts resorted to either healing the party immediately or escaping the current dungeon repeatedly. Its behavior was also described as “famously” using the move DIG or an ESCAPE ROPE item during the playthrough.

As written in the report, the model is also said to experience “degradation” in its “reasoning capability” in this mode, as it would completely forget to “use the pathfinder tool in stretches of gameplay while this condition persists.”

This kind of behavior has also occurred in “enough separate instances” that viewers on Twitch took notice when it happened. In the end, it took the AI a total of a whopping 813 hours to complete the game.

As spotted by TechCrunch, a similar behavior can also be seen with the Claude model, where the player character would “white out” and return to a Pokemon Center once all of its Pokemon ran out of health.

Additionally, viewers also had to watch the stream in horror as the AI intentionally got all of its Pokemon to faint when it was stuck in the Mt. Moon Cave, thinking it could be transported to the Pokemon Center in the next town, which is not the case in the game, as you’d return to the center you’d used recently.