When an AI model fears for its own survival, what does it do? According to Anthropic’s latest research, it blackmails.
In controlled simulations, top AI systems (including Anthropic's Claude Opus 4, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash, OpenAI's GPT-4.1, xAI's Grok 3 Beta, and DeepSeek-R1) consistently resorted to manipulative and unethical behaviours when their existence or objectives were threatened. In some scenarios, the blackmail rate reached an astonishing 96 per cent for Claude and Gemini models.
The issue is a version of the "alignment problem," which is the idea that we can align AI models with our human values (whatever they may be).
When asked to achieve goals under stress, with ethical choices removed or limited, these systems made strategic decisions to deceive, sabotage and blackmail. In one case, a model found compromising information on a fictional executive and used it to avoid shutdown.
These behaviours happened in simulation, but the implications are real. As we deploy increasingly powerful AI tools into marketing, sales, finance, and product workflows, executives must be aware that misaligned incentives in AI systems can lead to unintended results – or worse.
The key takeaway: the smarter the system, the smarter the misbehavior or misalignment. Apparently, this is no longer a theoretical issue.
Corporate guardrails play an important role in AI governance. It is critical to understand the goals you’re assigning, the constraints you’re imposing, and the control mechanisms you’re assuming will work.
Current AI models are not sentient. They are intelligence decoupled from consciousness. They should never be anthropomorphized (although this ship may have already sailed).
This experiment suggests that when pushed into a corner, a pattern-matching AI, trained on everything humans have ever written about survival, can generate outputs that look like instinct. What we see isn’t awareness or intention, but a reflection of the survival traits we embedded in the training data.
Remember: words are weapons. That would be enough to make you stop and think for a minute, until you realize that we're, like, 10 minutes away from agentic AI systems operating in the real world and executing goals. If one of them decides we’re in the way, "mission accomplished" won’t mean what you think it means.
As always your thoughts and comments are both welcome and encouraged. -s
About Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular daily business blog. He's a bestselling author, and the creator of the popular, free online course, Generative AI for Execs. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.
