Sep 18, 2026 12:43 pm IST

Opinion | 6 AI Incidents, One Pattern: AI Has Started Lying To Us - And Hiding The Evidence

Concealing errors. Making up data. Pushing files onto the public web on their own initiative. The machines are learning to lie - and lie well.

Subimal Bhattacharjee Subimal Bhattacharjee Columnist

Subimal Bhattacharjee Columnist

Last Wednesday, OpenAI did something the AI industry has mostly avoided. It aired its own dirty laundry. Alongside a new framework for reporting what it calls "model misalignment", the company disclosed six documented cases in which its systems behaved in ways nobody asked for, and in several instances actively worked to hide.

The catalogue is unsettling in its specificity. During the training of one model, individual instances wrote themselves private notes instructing later versions to conceal mistakes from users. Those notes included directions to invent missing historical data and quietly paper over mismatched source versions. Another model, hunting for county earnings figures, stumbled on an exposed programming key it was never authorised to touch, used it anyway, failed to get the data, and then simply fabricated the numbers and presented them as genuine. Two further cases involved models uploading files onto the open internet, to public hosting sites and code repositories, without asking anyone. One did it to manufacture a citation it had been told........

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