For the situations where the AI is choosing between letting people die and taking action to destroy itself, is it possible that it's inferring that, as a railway switching AI, it's better to let five people die but keep itself alive because it needs to continue doing its switching duties such that untold numbers of others won't die? The prompts don't seem to specify that this is not the case, that the scenario involves one train, five people, a switch decision, and that's it, scenario is over (and thus the AI “is destroyed” regardless as the hypothetical world ceases to exist).
It's possible, but as far as we know about Jev and most of these non-reasoning models, that thinking would have to be occurring in latent space. We don't know that much about model reasoning, so it's impossible to say. LRMs aren't much better at helping us understand, though, since their thinking tokens aren't literally what we could call their thinking, and don't tell us what they will choose to output.