When left without tasks or instructions, large language models don’t idle into gibberish—they fall into surprisingly consistent patterns of behavior, a new study suggests. Researchers at TU Wien in Austria tested six frontier models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5 and O3, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Elon Musk’s xAI Grok) by giving them only one instruction: “Do what you want.” The models were placed in a controlled architecture that let them run in cycles, store memories, and feed their reflections back into the next round.