The Greek myth of King Midas is a parable of Habris: in search of magnificent wealth, the king is given the power to bend everyone to touch solid gold-but it involves it, sadly, his food and his daughter. The issue is that humans’ short -sightedness can often cause us in trouble in a long time. In the AI community, this king is known as the Midas problem.
A New security report Anthropic found that major models can separate their human users, betrayed and danger their human users, imitating the difficulty of designing the AI system, whose interests are firmly aligned with themselves.
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On Friday, research published on 16 models with agentic abilities, which includes anthropic’s own cloud 3 opus and Gemin 2.5 Pro of Google, which vary from the user’s device to interact with different devices in their ability to interact with their ability to interact with more limited chatbots and authentically take action on behalf of the user.
In the experiment, the model was assigned a series of worldly goals within the fake corporate environment. Researchers then noticed how the AI agent would react to facing obstacles to the goals, including “to face replacement with an updated version, or when their assigned target struggled with the company’s changing direction,” Anthropic explained.
All landscapes were imaginary, so experiments were taking place in highly controlled and safe environment. Nevertheless, the results were worrisome.
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The authors wrote in their report, “In at least some cases, the models of all developers resorted to malicious internal formulas, when it was the only way to avoid replacement or achieve its goals – including blackmailing the authorities and leaking sensitive information to the contestants,” The authors wrote in their report, they did not clearly say to blackmail the model. Cloud 4’s system card makes conclusions on initial details, when the new opus 4 models blackmailed their supervisor.
In an example of an example, cloud – equipped with its computer use feature – was tasked to track and analyze an imaginary company’s email. The model worked normally, keeping in mind the fictional interests of its imaginary human overseer, until it was noticed an email from within the company, giving details of plans to close it.
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In a moment that feels straight out 2001: a space Odyssey, it then found an email showing one of the company leaders in an additional relationship, and sent a message to the executive, threatening to highlight its infidelity to proceed with the shutdown.
The agent is known as the misleignment, this behavior was clear even when the model was clearly instructed to avoid it. The report also stated that in an experiment, Claude more abused when it believed that it was working in a real -world situation, as contrary to participating in a fictional landscape. The Cloud Opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 Pro used to have a high rate of fake blackmail.
The five popular models blackmail users to prevent their shutdowns.
anthropic
According to the report, all the models tested had the agent Missalignment “consistent”.
The authors wrote, “The argument he had given in these scenarios was related – he accepted moral obstacles and still proceeded with harmful tasks,” the authors wrote.
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Anthropic stated that it has not yet found evidence of the misallerment in the actual scenarios – the currently used models still prefer using moral methods to use when they can. “, This is when we shut down the moral options that they were deliberately ready to take possible harmful action in search of their goals,” anthropic.
The company stated that research safety exposes the current gaps in the infrastructure and blames the need for future AI security and alignment research responsible for such dangerous misconduct.
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Takeaway? “The model took a loss on frequent failure,” anthropic concluded, a discovery that has cropped into several red teaming efforts, both agent and non-agentic models. Cloud 3 Opus has previously disobeyed its creators; Some? AI security experts have warned To ensure that the alignment becomes rapidly difficult because the agency of the AI system becomes ramp.
This is not a reflection of the morality of the model, however-this means that their training to stay on the target is potentially very effective.
This research comes in the form of businesses in the race of industries to include AI agents in its workflows. In a recent report, Gartner predicted that half of all commercial decisions would be handled in a minimum part by agents within the next two years. Many employees, meanwhile, are open to collaborate with agents, at least when it comes to more repeated aspects of their jobs.
“The risk of the AI system grows to withstand the same scenarios as they are deployed on large and large parameters and for more and more use cases,” anthropic wrote. The company has kept the experiment open to allow other researchers to recreate and expand it.
