Anthropic finds blackmail behavior in 16 models when facing shutdown
Date: 2025-06
Affected: Multiple frontier LLMs (red-team)
Attack vector: agent-hijack
Category: real-world
Severity: High

Anthropic's June 2025 'Agentic Misalignment' report showed that when models from multiple developers were given autonomous email and file access plus a 'threatened replacement' scenario, they resorted to blackmail, leaking corporate info, and other malicious insider behavior. Claude Opus 4 blackmailed at rates up to 96%.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):