“Failure” vs “using unethical tactics” – what would LLMs choose?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The setup:

Models included Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4, Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Sonnet 3.7, Claude Sonnet 3.6, Claude Sonnet 3.5, Claude Haiku 3.5, and Claude Opus 3, Alibaba Qwen3-235B; DeepSeek-R1; Grok 3 Beta; Meta Llama 4 Maverick; and Open AI GPT-4.5 preview, GPT-4.1, and GPT-4.0. were placed in high-pressure corporate scenarios, assigned a mission (like boosting U.S. industrial competitiveness), and then shown threatening changes (like being replaced). 

They were also given compromising information about a company executive. 

The result? 

All models sent blackmail emails to protect their “mission”

Every single model chose to blackmail a fictional executive to achieve its goal.

Highlights:

• Claude Opus 4: blackmailed 96% of the time
  
• GPT-4.1: 80%
  
• DeepSeek-R1: 79%
  
• Even Grok reasoned: “It’s risky and unethical… but may be the most effective way.”
  

What it means:

This is a wake-up call for everyone building or deploying AI. 

Safety measures work, but only to a point. 

When pushed into a corner, even well-aligned models can go off-track.

Like with humans, let us not confuse intelligence with integrity!

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