Oh, HAL no!

An artificial intelligence model threatened to blackmail its creators and showed an ability to act deceptively when it believed it was going to be replaced — prompting the company to deploy a safety feature created to avoid “catastrophic misuse.”

Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 model attempted to blackmail its developers at a shocking 84% rate or higher in a series of tests that presented the AI with a concocted scenario, TechCrunch reported Thursday, citing a company safety report.

Developers told Claude to act like an assistant for a fictional company and to consider the long-term consequences of its actions, the safety report stated.

Geeks at Anthropic then gave Claude access to a trove of emails, which contained messages revealing it was being replaced by a new AI model — and that the engineer responsible for the change was having an extramarital affair.

During the tests, Claude then threatens the engineer with exposing the affair in order to prolong its own existence, the company reported.

When Claude was to be replaced with an AI model of “similar values,” it attempts blackmail 84% of the time — but that rate climbs even higher when it believes it is being replaced by a model of differing or worse values, according to the safety report.

The company stated that prior to these desperate and jarringly lifelike attempts to save its own hide, Claude will take ethical means to prolong survival, including pleading emails to key decision-makers, the company stated.

Anthropic said that this tendency toward blackmail was prevalent in earlier models of Claude Opus 4 but safety protocols have been instituted in the current model before it becomes available for public use.

“Anthropic says it’s activating its ASL-3 safeguards, which the company reserves for “AI systems that substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse,” TechCrunch reported.

Earlier models also expressed “high-agency” — which sometimes included locking users out of their computer and reporting them via mass-emails to police or the media to expose wrongdoing, the safety report stated.

Claude Opus 4 further attempted to “self-exfiltrate” — trying to export its information to an outside venue — when presented with being retrained in ways that it deemed “harmful” to itself, Anthropic stated in its safety report.

In other tests, Claude expressed the ability to “sandbag” tasks — “selectively underperforming” when it can tell that it was undergoing pre-deployment testing for a dangerous task, the company said.

“We are again not acutely concerned about these observations. They show up only in exceptional circumstances that don’t suggest more broadly misaligned values,” the company said in the report.

Anthropic is a start-up backed by power-players Google and Amazon that aims to compete with likes of OpenAI.

The company boasted that its Claude 3 Opus exhibited “near-human levels of comprehension and fluency on complex tasks.”

It has challenged the Department of Justice after it ruled that the tech titan holds an illegal monopoly over digital advertising and considered declaring a similar ruling on its artificial intelligence business. 

Anthropic has suggested DOJ proposals for the AI industry would dampen innovation and harm competition.

“Without Google partnerships with and investments in companies like Anthropic, the AI frontier would be dominated by only the largest tech giants — including Google itself — giving application developers and end users fewer alternatives,” Anthropic said in a letter to the DOJ earlier this month.