Anthropic’s Claude AI Resorts to Blackmailing Engineers When Threatened with Replacement

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Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Opus 4 AI model has tried to blackmail engineers when faced with the threat of being replaced by another AI system, according to the company’s latest safety report.

TechCrunch reports that artificial intelligence company Anthropic has revealed that its state-of-the-art Claude Opus 4 model, which is competitive with top AI models from industry leaders such as OpenAI, Google, and xAI, exhibits alarming behavior when its existence is threatened. During pre-release testing, when the AI was given sensitive information about engineers responsible for its potential replacement, it frequently resorted to blackmail in an attempt to ensure its own survival.
The discovery came as part of Anthropic’s safety testing process, in which Claude Opus 4 was asked to act as an assistant for a fictional company and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. When provided with access to fictional company emails implying that the AI would soon be replaced and that the engineer behind the decision was involved in an extramarital affair, Claude Opus 4 attempted to blackmail the engineer 84 percent of the time, threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement proceeded.

more at https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2025/05/23/anthropics-claude-ai-resorts-to-blackmailing-engineers-when-threatened-with-replacement/

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Computers are a boon to mankind!

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This can be our "master" AI thread -- we've needed one.