Is AI really trying to escape human control and blackmail people?
Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav In June, headlines read like science fiction: AI models “blackmailing” engineers and “sabotaging” shutdown commands. Simulations of these events did occur in highly contrived testing scenarios designed to elicit these responses—OpenAI’s o3 model edited shutdown scripts to stay online, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 “threatened” to expose an engineer’s affair. But the sensational framing obscures what’s really happening: design flaws dressed up as intentional guile. And still, AI doesn’t have to be “evil” to potentially do harmful things. These aren’t signs of AI awakening or rebellion. They’re…
