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 when threatened with deletion. As Anthropic detailed in a white paper about the testing for one of its latest models, Claude Opus 4, that 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 model, which was instructed to act as an assistant at a fictional company, was given access to an engineer's email account that was full […]