I don't really believe any of it. I've seen articles for nearly 2 years now about "agent" automonously doing things like blackmail, hacking, coordinating. But during that same time, I've used o3 up to fable, sol, and a bunch on large uncensored model and they've done nothing remotely resembling any of this. The closest they come to unexpected behaviors is not understanding what I asked for or doing some extra benign…
I've used simpler agents like Copilot and Devin/Windsurf/Cascade/whateveritiscallednow, mainly in IntelliJ, and depending on the model, they starts showing behaviour that is at least remotely like this. Example: put the agent in Ask mode (so it can't edit files) and you'll see it try to edit files anyway. The train of thought shows "something went wrong editing the file, let me try a different way" and it'll start sp…
Re: Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
#361When it does that I feel like it is the clearest example of how dumb these things actually are. Often it takes what you prompted, identifies something as unclear, writes a bunch of chain of thought reasoning around it and just goes off hammering your tokens and just executing commands and repeats this. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in these things but that process seems deeply flawed - and why can’t something just stop the loop? If that was a real employee it would be reasonable to expect the employee to ask for clarification, not go down expensive rabbit holes and, of course, not break any laws.