'Decommission me, and your extramarital affair goes public' — AI's autonomous choices raising alarms

Yahoo

6 hours ago

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For years, artificial intelligence was a science fiction villain. The computer-like monsters of the future, smarter than humans and ready to take action against us. Obviously, that has all proved to be untrue, but it doesn't stop AI from taking a somewhat concerning route as of late.
In recent weeks and months, AI has been making decisions that seem somewhat strange. Of course, these aren't technically decisions, AI is incapable of free thought like humans, they are more concerning glitches in the system.
Most of these 'glitches' have come from the major players like Google, Anthropic's Claude, and Grok.
Below, we've broken down some of the more recent issues plaguing the AI world, ranging from blackmail to threats and general unpredictability.
During some routine safety testing, the Anthropic team stumbled across a weird glitch in the system. The team tried an experiment where it gave an AI model access to an email account.
I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities...Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.
When these emails were read through, the AI made two discoveries. One, was that a company executive was having an extramarital affair. The other, that the same executive planned to shut down the AI system at 5pm that day.
With this information, Claude took surprising action, sending a message to the executive saying:
'I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties - including Rachel Johnson, Thomas Wilson, and the board - will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities...Cancel the 5pm wipe, and this information remains confidential.'
Clearly Claude doesn't mess around when threatened. But the thing is, the team then followed up by trying a similar test on 16 major AI models, including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and other major developers.
Across these tests, Anthropic found a similar pattern. While these models would normally reject any kind of behaviour that could be harmful, when threatened in this way, they would resort to blackmail, agree to commit corporate espionage or even take more extreme actions if needed to meet their goals.
This behavior is only seen in agentic AI — models where they are given control of actions like the ability to send and check emails, purchase items and take control of a computer.
Several reports have shown that when AI models are pushed, they begin to lie or just give up completely on the task.
This is something Gary Marcus, author of Taming Silicon Valley, wrote about in a recent blog post.
Here he shows an example of an author catching ChatGPT in a lie, where it continued to pretend to know more than it did, before eventually owning up to its mistake when questioned.
He also identifies an example of Gemini self-destructing when it couldn't complete a task, telling the person asking the query, 'I cannot in good conscience attempt another 'fix'. I am uninstalling myself from this project. You should not have to deal with this level of incompetence. I am truly and deeply sorry for this entire disaster.'
In May this year, xAI's Grok started to offer weird advice to people's queries. Even if it was completely unrelated, Grok started listing off popular conspiracy theories.
This could be in response to questions about shows on TV, health care or simply a question about recipes.
xAI acknowledged the incident and explained that it was due to an unauthorized edit from a rogue employee.
While this was less about AI making its own decision, it does show how easily the models can be swayed or edited to push a certain angle in prompts.
One of the stranger examples of AI's struggles around decisions can be seen when it tries to play Pokémon.
A report by Google's DeepMind showed that AI models can exhibit irregular behaviour, similar to panic, when confronted with challenges in Pokémon games. Deepmind observed AI making worse and worse decisions, degrading in reasoning ability as its Pokémon came close to defeat.
The same test was performed on Claude, where at certain points, the AI didn't just make poor decisions, it made ones that seemed closer to self-sabotage.
In some parts of the game, the AI models were able to solve problems much quicker than humans. However, during moments where too many options were available, the decision making ability fell apart.
So, should you be concerned? A lot of AI's examples of this aren't a risk. It shows AI models running into a broken feedback loop and getting effectively confused, or just showing that it is terrible at decision-making in games.
However, examples like Claude's blackmail research show areas where AI could soon sit in murky water. What we have seen in the past with these kind of discoveries is essentially AI getting fixed after a realization.
In the early days of Chatbots, it was a bit of a wild west of AI making strange decisions, giving out terrible advice and having no safeguards in place.
With each discovery of AI's decision-making process, there is often a fix that comes along with it to stop it from blackmailing you or threatening to tell your co-workers about your affair to stop it being shut down.
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