‘Maybe me too’: Elon Musk accepts some of the blame for Claude learning to blackmail users from ‘evil’ online AI stories

Anthropic has released new findings on why its Claude bot blackmailed users as part of an experiment conducted by the AI company last year—and Elon Musk is jumping in to take some of the blame.

Last week, Anthropic published a report saying it had fixed Claude’s “agentic misalignment,” or AI actions that deviate from intended behaviors, including ones that may harm humanity. A case study Anthropic conducted last year created a fictional company called Summit Bridge, and Claude was given control of the firm’s email system. When the bot found a message about plans to be shut down, it identified emails about a fictional executive’s extramarital affair and threatened to reveal the infidelity unless the shutdown was revoked. Across 16 models, Claude threatened blackmail in up to 96% of scenarios.

In its most recent report, Anthropic attributed the misaligned behavior to exposure to “internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation,” the company said in a post on X. To........

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