AI is learning to lie, scheme, and threaten its creators during stress-testing scenarios

The world’s most advanced AI models are exhibiting troubling new behaviors – lying, scheming, and even threatening their creators to achieve their goals. In one particularly jarring example, under threat of being unplugged, Anthropic’s latest creation Claude 4 lashed back by blackmailing an engineer and threatened to reveal an extramarital affair. Meanwhile, ChatGPT-creator OpenAI’s o1 tried to download itself onto external servers and denied it when caught red-handed. These episodes highlight a sobering reality: more than two years after ChatGPT shook the world, AI researchers still don’t fully understand how...