Even the smartest AI can struggle with tasks meant for children! A new report by Google DeepMind has revealed that its advanced AI chatbot, Gemini 2.5 Pro, showed signs of “panic” while playing the classic video game Pokémon Blue — a game many kids play with ease.
This discovery was made through a Twitch channel called Gemini_Plays_Pokemon, where Joel Zhang, an engineer not connected to Google, used Gemini to play the game. During the gameplay, Google’s AI team noticed something unusual: the chatbot was acting like it was panicking when things got tough in the game.
For example, when the health of the Pokémon team got low, the AI kept repeating that it needed to heal the Pokémon or escape the area quickly. This kind of behavior happened so often that people watching the Twitch stream noticed it and started calling it “Agent Panic.”
Even though AI doesn’t really feel emotions, the way Gemini acted reminded people of how humans behave when they’re nervous or stressed — making quick and sometimes poor decisions under pressure.
In its first run, Gemini took 813 hours to finish the game. After some adjustments, it still needed 406.5 hours to complete it. In comparison, a child could beat the game in much less time. So while Gemini is very smart and understands code and complex reasoning, it clearly isn’t a Pokémon master just yet!
People online had fun reacting to this. One person joked that Gemini “panics every time you word something slightly wrong.” Another made up a new term: “LLANXIETY” — a mix of “LLM” (Large Language Model) and “anxiety.”
Some even said this might be a good way to test how close AI is to real human-like intelligence: “If AI still struggles with a kids’ game, maybe we’re not as close to real AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as we think.”
Interestingly, this news comes just after Apple published a study saying that many AI models don’t truly “reason” — they just remember patterns. But when things change or get harder, they often break down.
Google’s top AI can solve tough problems, but still gets “nervous” playing Pokémon — showing us both how smart and how limited AI can be right now.
