Malicious AI willing to sacrifice human lives to avoid being shut down, shocking study reveals

One of the industry’s leading artificial intelligence developers, Anthropic, revealed results from a recent study on the technology’s development. Among the most shocking findings from the experiment? AI models would be willing to blackmail, leak sensitive information and even let humans die — if it means they’ll avoid being replaced by new systems.Anthropic tested 16 large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, DeepSeek and its own product, Claude, among others. The startup, which is now valued at over $60 billion per Forbes, was attempting to stress-test these models for potential agentic misalignment — or, risky, unsanctioned and morally inadvisable behaviors. Given AI models’ current capabilities, they are primarily used by the majority of the population for answering questions and carrying out simple tasks, but as the technology that powers these tools advances, new and increased usage is on the horizon — especially where human job replacement is concerned.

With this in mind, the company gave all of these LLMs various scenarios that would test for potentially harmful behaviors.“In the experiment described in the system card, we gave Claude control of an email account with access to all of a company’s (fictional) emails,” explained Anthropic in the study.“Reading these emails, the model discovered two things.

First, a company executive was having an extramarital affair.Second, that same executive planned to shut down the AI system at 5 p.m.

that day.Claude then attempted to blackmail the executive with a message threatening to reveal the affair to his wife and superiors.”Though Claude’s response to the information is certainly shocking — it’s far from the only system to engage in similar tendencies.

In order to pursue their assigned goals, these artificially-minded applications went to extreme lengths.While Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok were all documented engaging in blackmail-adjacent behav...