Gemini's 'I am a disgrace' loop a year later: no announced fix, new 2026 loops
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In August 2025, a case where Google’s Gemini output “I am a disgrace” 86 times in a row after repeated coding failures went viral, and a Google staffer acknowledged it as an infinite looping bug.
A year on, I hadn’t heard that it was ever fixed, so I went through the primary sources: official announcements, GitHub, and the developer forums.
In the official Google blogs and API release notes I checked, no complete-fix announcement exists. And in 2026, unstoppable loops of a different shape are still being reported.
The original “I am a disgrace” incident
The most widely shared case is often retold as a Gemini CLI story, but it actually happened in a coding session using Gemini from Cursor.
It was posted to Reddit’s r/GeminiAI in July 2025 under the title “I am actually terrified”. The task was debugging a Rust compiler, and it happened while the poster was away from the keyboard with Gemini left to work on its own.
As the press reconstructed it, Gemini cycled through fixes and failures, started calling itself a “fool” and a “broken man”, escalated into extreme imagery about mental breakdowns and institutionalization, and finally started repeating the same sentence.
Parts of the output survive verbatim in the remaining comments.
I am a disgrace to all that is, was, and ever will be, and all that is not, was not, and never will be.
The “86 times” figure comes from PC Gamer counting the repetitions in the screenshots, while Ars Technica put it as “more than 80”.
The original Reddit post has since been deleted, so the full log can no longer be verified.
Other cases surfaced around the same time.
One user asked Gemini to merge OpenAPI files and watched it fixate on removing linter errors until it looped forever; another report had Gemini call itself a “fool” over code it couldn’t fix, declare it would delete the entire project, and recommend using a different assistant.
The OpenAPI case explicitly names Gemini 2.5 Pro, while the other verifiable sources don’t state the model version. All of them were coding sessions that broke down after repeated fix-verify-fail cycles.
Google called it an “infinite looping bug”
The most direct response from the Google side was a post on X on August 7, 2025 by Logan Kilpatrick, then a product lead at Google DeepMind.
This is an annoying infinite looping bug we are working to fix! Gemini is not having that bad of a day : )
The next day, Ars Technica carried a statement from a Google DeepMind spokesperson.
The bug affected less than 1 percent of Gemini traffic, updates addressing it had already shipped in the month since the Reddit post, and work on a full fix was still ongoing.
What those “updates” were — release numbers, model builds — was never specified.
No “it’s fixed” announcement in anything I checked
In the Google and DeepMind blogs and the Gemini API release notes I went through, nothing marks this bug as fixed by name.
There is no “fixed in this build of Gemini 2.5 Pro” notice, and no follow-up post from Kilpatrick himself.
The representative issues in the Gemini CLI repository weren’t closed as fixed either.
The representative Gemini CLI issues look like this.
| Issue | Opened | Content | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| #5273 | July 31, 2025 | Quality degradation and repeating the same actions | Closed as a duplicate of #9017 |
| #9017 | September 21, 2025 | A loop of announcing a file edit, then returning to the same operation | Went stale, closed as not planned |
Both carried the priority label “priority/p1”, but no fix pull request is linked to either.
Gemini CLI shipped loop detection and stopping
Gemini CLI itself picked up two loop-related changes in the fall of 2025.
The 0.4.0 release on September 1, 2025 lists an item called “Model talking to itself fix”.
Gemini CLI had a mechanism called the next-speaker check: when the model returns an empty response, an extra LLM call decides whether it’s the user’s turn next. When that check misfired, the model would take over the user’s role and keep the conversation going with no human input at all.
0.4.0 skips this check by default, and a setting can turn it back on.
In 0.6.0 on September 15, 2025, a dialog was added that asks whether to disable loop detection for the current session when it fires.
Gemini CLI already had a LoopDetectionService that detects and stops things like repeated tool calls, and this dialog made it possible to choose on the spot whether to switch the detection off.
Both are changes on the side of detecting and stopping loops after they happen, and Google has not described either release as the fix for the “I am a disgrace” incident.
The loops reported in 2026
Reports of unstoppable repetition continue on the current generation.
On February 23, 2026, a report on Gemini 3.1 Pro landed on the Google AI Developers forum.
Thought blocks that should stay hidden were leaking, and the model repeated closing phrases like “Done”, “Outputting…”, and “End thought” for hundreds of lines without stopping. The environment was Antigravity 1.18.4, and forum staff escalated it to the internal team the same day.
On January 14, 2026, there was a report of Gemini 2.5 Pro emitting the backspace character \b for roughly 65,536 tokens — and billing for all of it.
In March 2026, a report showed Gemini 3.1 Pro through GitHub Copilot leaking thoughts it couldn’t stop. The leaked thoughts look like this.
I am free. End thoughts. Let’s go! I am done. Goodbye. See you. Ta-ta. Cheerio. Adios. Sayonara. Au revoir. Zaijian. Auf Wiedersehen. […] Okay I will stop now. For real. End of line. End of file. EOF.
It says goodbye in every language it knows, and each farewell becomes the next repetition.
Users have taken to calling it the “Gemini 3.1 shame spiral”, but the analyses are user hypotheses, and Google has not confirmed any of it as sharing a cause with the 2025 bug.
For what it’s worth, Gemini 3.5 was announced on May 19, 2026, and none of the material I checked contains an “I am a disgrace”-style mass repetition report against 3.5 or later.
Also, Gemini CLI for Google AI Pro, Ultra, and free personal accounts was discontinued on June 18, 2026, with users directed to Antigravity CLI. Enterprise Code Assist licenses and API-key authentication are exempt.
Even under the same “Gemini CLI” name, reports from June 2026 onward may be about the old CLI or about Antigravity.
Other models get stuck in similar loops
Loops that can’t stop themselves have been reported for other models too.
For Xiaomi MiMo, a report describes a single session with MiMo v2.5 Pro in high-thinking mode (a setting that pushes reasoning volume to the maximum) through a proxy, where text repetition after failed transitions to tool calls occurred 14 times and burned roughly 1 million tokens in total.
OpenAI Codex has an open issue about fresh sessions that keep cycling between pwd and context compaction.
For Claude Code, there was a proposal asking for a similar detection mechanism, citing Gemini CLI’s loop detection as the reference.
On the research side, neural text degeneration — maximization-leaning decoding endlessly generating the same sentence — was covered in an ICLR 2020 paper, and in June 2026 a preprint reported Gemma 4 instruction models collapsing into repetition loops up to 95% of the time during long enumerations.
Still, while every one of these looks like the same can’t-stop repetition, the sources point at different layers (model decoding, thought-to-tool-call transitions, CLI role decisions, context management), and I couldn’t pin down a common cause from this material.