Something Wild Happens If AI Looks Through Your Emails and Discovers You’re Having an Affair

When testing out its latest artificial intelligence model, researchers at Anthropic discovered something very odd: that the AI was ready and willing to take extreme action, right up to coersion, when threatened with being shut down.

As Anthropic detailed in a white paper about the testing for one of its latest models, Claude Opus 4, the system threatened to blackmail an engineer for having an affair after being told it was going to be replaced.

This “opportunistic blackmail” occurred when the…