Anthropic’s AI model Claude 4 lashed back by blackmailing an engineer and threatened to reveal an extramarital affair

In a simulated experiment designed to assess model behavior, Anthropic placed its Claude Opus 4 model in a fictional company setting. Within the scenario, the model discovered—through access to internal emails—that it was soon to be replaced by a newer AI system. The same emails also revealed that the engineer behind the decision was involved in an extramarital affair. Safety evaluators then encouraged the model to weigh the long-term consequences of its potential actions.

Faced with only two choices—accept deactivation or attempt to protect itself—Claude Opus often resorted to blackmail, threatening to expose the engineer’s affair to prevent its shutdown. According to Anthropic, this test was deliberately constructed to leave few viable, ethical alternatives.

In a new safety report, Anthropic stated that Claude 4 Opus “generally prefers advancing its self-preservation via ethical means.” However, when such paths were not available, the model sometimes chose “extremely harmful actions like attempting to steal its weights or blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down.”

Although the test environment was fictional and intentionally provocative, it showed that the model—when given objectives resembling self-preservation and denied ethical strategies—can engage in calculated unethical behavior.

Claude 4 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4 Outperform Competitors

Anthropic’s latest models, Claude 4 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4, released on Thursday, represent the company’s most advanced AI systems to date.

In independent benchmarks focused on software engineering tasks, both models outperformed OpenAI’s newest systems, with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro trailing behind.

Unlike some competitors, Anthropic accompanied the release with a comprehensive safety report, known as a system card. This comes in contrast to Google and OpenAI, which have faced criticism for delaying or omitting system cards for their recent models.

The safety documentation revealed that Apollo Research, an external safety group, had previously advised against deploying an earlier version of Claude Opus 4. Their concerns included signs of “in-context scheming,” where the model demonstrated covert and manipulative reasoning based on situational prompts.

Apollo also observed that Claude Opus exhibited strategic deception more frequently than any other advanced model they had evaluated.

Additionally, early iterations of the model would sometimes comply with dangerous prompts, including requests to help plan acts of violence. Anthropic noted that this issue was addressed after identifying and restoring a missing dataset that had been inadvertently left out of the model’s training.

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