Anthropic says ‘evil’ portrayals of AI were responsible for Claude’s blackmail attempts
In Brief
1:40 PM PDT · May 10, 2026
Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, according to Anthropic.
Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced by another system. Anthropic later published research suggesting that models from other companies had similar issues with “agentic misalignment.”
Apparently Anthropic has done more work around that behavior, claiming in a post on X, “We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation.”
The company went into more detail in a blog post stating that since Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic’s models “never engage in blackmail [during testing], where previous models would sometimes do so up to 96% of the time.”
What accounts for the difference? The company...
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