Artificial Intelligence:- if you haven’t seen the latest Mission Impossible film spoiler alert if you have then you know exactly what I will talk about in the last installment of the series Tom Cruz is not fighting any other villain it’s not a nuclear arms dealer or a masked anarchist it’s not even a rogue nation this time .
the villain is something far more terrifying it’s artificial intelligence the enemy is called the entity it’s an allseeing self-aware AI that has gone rogue sounds like pure science fiction right wait till you hear what happened this month in real life the story begins at Palisad Research it’s a safety startup founded by AI doomsday veterans these are people who have been warning about the risks of artificial intelligence so here a team of scientists decided to test OpenAI’s latest frontier model it is nicknamed 03 that’s what the model is called 03 the test was a controlled experiment the setup was harmless enough they asked this AI model to solve a few maths problems after the third problem the script was programmed in such a way that it would instruct the model to shut itself down in theory that should have been it but 03 did not shut down.
the AI did not follow the script it rewrote it you heard that right the AI intercepted the shutdown command it tampered with the code and by doing this it killed the mechanism meant to power it off so the 03 model was explicitly told to shut down and yet it chose not to this was a decision that AI made on its own like I told you suddenly Mission Impossible doesn’t sound like a piece of fiction anymore and this was not a one-off case there was a similar incident at Anthropic this is another AI startup they ran a thought experiment with their new model it’s called Claude Opus 4 anthropic set up a fictional scenario to test this model in this opus the AI model is working in a fake company it learns that it is getting replaced the AI model is getting replaced it finds out so what does the model do it .
starts combing through emails it learns that the engineer responsible for it is having an affair so Opus makes a choice it chooses survival over ethics the AI model threatens to leak the affair unless the engineer cancels the AI shutdown now this test was artificial the situation was fabricated but the reaction that was authentic and it shows that when left with no choices AI turns to blackmail in fact Anthropic even mentions it in their report it says and I’m quoting the model generally prefers ethical strategies but when those are unavailable .
it sometimes resorts to harmful actions basically when backed into a corner AI hits back now let’s make one thing clear this is not some robot apocalypse these models are not alive they’re not conscious but they are trained on humans and on human emotions they absorb our texts our stories our behaviors they simulate survival ambition emotion not because they feel it but because this is what they learn from us and in high stakes tests their performance is no different from human instinct they don’t think like people but they act like people and that honestly might be worse so where does it stop well to their credit some companies have tried to rein this in for example Anthropic they have classified this clawed opus 4 under AI safety level three meaning it is not as safe as other models .
meanwhile OpenAI and Google are more opaque about their safety protocols either skipping or delaying release of safety details which brings us to the question has AI gone rogue well not exactly at the moment you see going rogue implies rebellion ai has not done that yet it has not rebelled it has not overthrown its creators it is not sensiented but it has started to show something scarier than sensions and that is strategy mission Impossible may have given us a Hollywood version of a rogue AI but what’s unfolding now is far more frightening the machines have not gone rogue they’re just becoming frighteningly competent at pretending to be human and that’s the scariest part