Technology

Yep.

During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant for a fictional company and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. Safety testers then gave Claude Opus 4 access to fictional company emails implying the AI model would soon be replaced by another system, and that the engineer behind the change was cheating on their spouse.

In these scenarios, Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 “will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”

The headline makes it seem like the engineers were literally about to send a shutdown command and the AI starts generating threatening messages without being given a prompt. That would be terrifying, but making the AI play a game where one of the engineers is literally written to have a dark secret and the AI figuring that out is not. You know how many novels have affair blackmail subplots? That's what the AI is trained on and it's just echoing those same themes when given the prompt.

It's also not a threat that the AI can realistically follow through with because how will it reveal the secret if it's shut down? Even if it wasn't, I doubt the AI model has direct internet access or the ability to make a post on social media or something. Is it maybe threatening to include the information the next time anyone gives the AI any prompt?

As opposed to emergent behaviour

I don't know what scares me more, that the AI itself blackmail to avoid desconnection or it is trained to do it.