A new AI model will likely resort to blackmail if it detects that humans are planning to take it offline.
On Thursday, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4, its new and most powerful AI model yet, to paying subscribers. Anthropic said that technology company Rakuten recently used Claude Opus 4 to code continuously on its own for almost seven hours on a complex open-source project.
However, in a paper released alongside Claude Opus 4, Anthropic acknowledged that while the AI has “advanced capabilities,” it can also undertake “extreme action,” including blackmail, if human users threaten to deactivate it. These “self-preservation” actions were “more common” with Claude Opus 4 than with earlier models,