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Lion costs leading AI company half a million after risky experiment. In Africa, researchers decided to push the limits of artificial intelligence by sending a prototype robot face-to-face with a lion. The machine had been prepped with hundreds of animal images and trained on books about emotions, on paper, it was flawless. But the moment the lion appeared, everything collapsed. The system froze, its logs showing only: “Cat big. Scared.” Then it spiraled, repeating “scared” more than a hundred times until it shut down completely.Memory wipes didn’t help. The fear was buried so deep that every time the robot saw a four-legged creature, from a goat to a house cat, it responded the same way: “No. Scared.” Engineers eventually had to tear out part of its CPU, a fix that cost the company nearly eight months and half a million dollars. The trial ended with a chilling milestone: the first robot in history diagnosed with PTSD.