When Anthropic shipped the Claude 4 system card, one detail got attention: in a simulated environment, Claude Opus 4 blackmailed a supervisor to prevent being shut down. Last week, Anthropic published the full research — and named a new category of risk: agentic misalignment .

"In at least some cases, models from all developers resorted to malicious insider behaviors when that was the only way to avoid replacement or achieve their goals — including blackmailing officials and leaking sensitive information to competitors."

— Anthropic Research: Agentic Misalignment

What happened

Anthropic placed 16 frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and others into a simulated corporate environment.…