Did AI robot suffer PTSD after it was scared by lion?

Claim:

An artificial-intelligence robot developed post-traumatic stress disorder after an experiment with a lion that scared it in 2025.

Rating:

False

About this rating

In September 2025, a story about an artificial-intelligence robot that apparently was the first of its kind to experience post-traumatic stress disorder spread across social media.

The most popular version of the story appeared on the Facebook page StoryTime (archived), which shared it alongside an image that got more than 186,000 reactions.

According to the post, an unnamed "leading AI company" trained a machine with hundreds of animal images and books on emotions before running a trial in which it faced a real lion in Africa. During that trial, the machine apparently glitched and repeated the word "scared" more than 100 times before freezing completely. Memory wipes didn't help, according to the post, and every time researchers showed the machine a four-legged creature afterward it just repeated, "No. Scared." Allegedly, the engineers of the unnamed company eventually had to tear out part of the machine's processor to fix it.

Multiple other Facebook (archived) pages (archived) reposted the story, which also made its way to other social media sites, such as X (archived).

There was no evidence the events described in the posts were real. Additionally, an image of a humanoid robot facing a lion that appeared in many of the posts was a mirrored screenshot of an AI-generated video. As a result, we've rated the claim false.

The story was also shared in a blog post that went into much more detail than the social media posts. However, not even the blog post named the company supposedly responsible for this AI robot and experiment. A common tactic used in fake stories posted to social media is to be vague on details, particularly regarding names, making it harder to disprove the story.

It would be newsworthy if a company had developed AI capable of genuine emotions. However, Google searches for "ai robot lion" and "robot ptsd" did not return results for any credible news stories, press releases or studies related to the supposed incident, although there were studies related to robots being used to help human patients suffering from PTSD.

Additionally, it's unclear how memories of the AI's experience with the lion could survive a memory wipe and continue to affect it, considering a memory wipe should reset the software to the state it was in prior to the trial and even the training.

The image in the posts came from a video (archived) a TikTok account with the display name viral_ai_reels posted in early September. A watermark in the bottom right of the video suggested its creator made it using Veo, Google's AI software that generates video content.

The caption for that AI-generated video, which had more than 8 million views as of this writing, actually described the reverse situation from the posts, reading, "Lion scared of AI Robot." Snopes messaged the account that posted the video to confirm they were its original creator and to get clarity on the origins of the PTSD story, but did not hear back before publishing.