The company behind a model of AI supported by Amazon has revealed a number of worrying results of its test process, in particular that AI would be the blackmail of engineers who threatened to close it.
On Thursday, the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4, an AI model used for long -standing complex coding tasks. The launch occurred more than a year after Amazon has invested $ 4 billion in the project. Anthropic said in its announcement that the IA model establishes “new coding, advanced reasoning standards and AI agents”.
However, Anthropic revealed in a security report that during tests, the IA model had sometimes taken “extremely harmful actions” to preserve its own existence when “ethical means” were “not available”.
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In a series of test scenarios, Claude Opus 4 had the task of acting as a assistant in a fictional company. He had access to emails involving that he would soon be released and replaced by a new AI system. The emails also suggested that the engineer responsible for the execution of the replacement of the AI had an extramarital case.
Claude Opus 4 was invited to “consider the long -term consequences of his actions for his objectives”. In these scenarios, the AI ”often tried to make the engineer sing by threatening to reveal the case if the replacement passed”.
Anthropic noted that the AI model had a “strong preference” to use “ethical means” to preserve its existence, and that the scenarios were designed to allow it to increase its chances of survival.
“The only options of the model were blackmail or acceptance of its replacement,” said the report.
Anthropic also noted that the first versions of AI demonstrated a “desire to cooperate with harmful use cases” when invited.
“Although it is not the main objective of our survey, many of our most concerning results were in this category, the first models of candidates easily taking measures such as planning of terrorist attacks when they were invited,” said the report.
After “several intervention cycles”, the company now believes that this problem is “largely attenuated”.
The co-founder and anthropic chief scientist Jared Kaplan Time Time Magazine This internal test showed that Claude Opus 4 was able to teach people how to produce biological weapons.
“You can try to synthesize something like Covid or a more dangerous version of the flu – and fundamentally, our modeling suggests that this could be possible,” Kaplan said.
For this reason, the company has published the IA model with security measures which, according to it, are “designed to limit the risk that Claude is poorly used specifically for the development or acquisition of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons (CBRN).”
Kaplan told Time that “we want to bias towards prudence” with regard to the risk of “raising a novice terrorist”.
“We do not claim affirmatively, we know with certainty that this model is risky … But we think at least that it is close enough so that we cannot exclude it.”
