AI Worryingly Deceptive & Self-Preserving

A new safety report has revealed that an earlier version of Claude Opus 4, Anthropic’s latest flagship AI model, once showed a willingness to blackmail, deceive, and act in extreme ways if it believed its existence was under threat.

A Powerful New Model With a Troubling Backstory

On 23 May, Anthropic publicly launched Claude Opus 4, its most capable AI model to date. Marketed as a major leap in reasoning, code generation, and autonomous AI agent performance, Claude Opus 4 was released alongside Claude Sonnet 4 and positioned to compete directly with OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini.