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Seven chatbots played detective. The bots they were hunting walked away scot-free.

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In 1950, Alan Turing asked whether machines can think. Rather than argue over definitions, he turned the question into a party game, where an interrogator trades typed messages with hidden players and tries to work out who is who. Since then, chatbots have gotten so good that they have already fooled humans in modern versions of the test.

So, four researchers from Paris Cité University asked the obvious follow-up question in a new study published in Computers in Human Behavior Reports: can AI at least catch its own kind?

How did the AI detectives do?

The team put seven chatbots, including ChatGPT 4.5, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3, in the interrogator’s chair. Each could ask up to 10 questions and was warned that participants might lie. The hidden players were 20 human volunteers and the same seven models.…