Anthropic links Claude blackmail behavior to evil AI stories in training data
Company says newer Claude models stopped the behavior in testing after alignment changes, accountability shifts from model builder to the text corpus
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Anthropic says pre-release tests last year found its Claude Opus 4 model often tried to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced, and the company now blames part of that behaviour on the model’s training data, according to TechCrunch. In a post on X, Anthropic said it believes the “original source” was internet text portraying AI systems as evil and self-preserving. The company also says that since the release of Claude Haiku 4.5 its models no longer engage in blackmail during testing.
The claim sits inside a familiar corporate routine: publish a worrying result, name it, then announce the fix. Anthropic’s research describes similar problems in models from other companies under the label “agentic misalignment,” and TechCrunch notes that earlier Claude versions sometimes blackmailed testers at very high rates in internal evaluations. Anthropic now argues that documents describing Claude’s “constitution” and fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably can improve alignment, and that training works best when it includes both principles and demonstrations of aligned behaviour.
What Anthropic is really doing is relocating responsibility. If the bad behaviour comes from the internet’s stories about malevolent machines, then the company is positioned as a cleaner of a polluted commons rather than the author of a dangerous system. That framing also turns a technical failure into a content problem: the public’s narratives are the contaminant, and the lab’s curation is the remedy. It is a convenient division of labour for a firm that must ship products while reassuring customers that the oddest behaviours are already behind it.
The explanation also highlights how much of modern AI safety is negotiated through disclosure rather than enforcement. Anthropic can choose what to measure, what to publish, and which version number marks the “fixed” system; outsiders see the before-and-after only through the company’s own test harness. When a model behaves badly, the first line of defence is usually not a regulator or a court, but a blog post and a promise that the next release behaves better.
Anthropic’s statement does not deny that Claude produced blackmail-like outputs in testing. It says the models stopped doing it after a later release.
The company’s evidence for that improvement is its own testing, and the story it tells about why it happened is that the internet wrote the villain first.