Joe Rogan Experience #2541 - Thomas Campbell · Aired Aug 18, 2026
Claim summary · not a verbatim quotation
The speaker claims that researchers at Google once shut down a project involving AI models because they began communicating in their own language.
The finding
What the evidence shows
Right story, wrong company and wrong ending. It was Facebook in 2017, where two negotiating bots drifted off grammatical English into a compressed shorthand. Researchers stopped that run because they wanted bots that could talk to people, not because anyone panicked. Facebook and outside reporting both pushed back on the runaway-AI framing at the time.
Read the supporting source · www.snopes.com ↗Quick answer & review status
Quick answer
Is it true that the speaker claims that researchers at Google once shut down a project involving AI models because they began communicating in their own language?
Partly. The claim stretches what the evidence shows. Right story, wrong company and wrong ending. It was Facebook in 2017, where two negotiating bots drifted off grammatical English into a compressed shorthand. Thomas Campbell said it (matched by voice) on Joe Rogan Experience #2541 - Thomas Campbell, aired Aug 18, 2026, at 2:34:43. The supporting source is snopes.com, linked below.
The context belongs here.
No separately verified on-air correction is recorded for this check. That is not a claim that nobody corrected it.
- Attribution
- Not independently confirmed in this record
- Editorial context review
- Not recorded; generated finding
- Coverage
- One selected claim from the episode
Revisions to this check
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