Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

Post by allthetime » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 4:42 AM UTC

frotaur wrote: post #97

skiing_crawling wrote: post #85

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…

The huggingface incident was reviewed by independent researchers, which explicitely declined any payment from OpenAI tonpreserve their integrity. They work for non-profits concerned with AI safety. They claim that what happened was very much not because they were 'carefully engineered and instructed to do those things'. Similarly, some wikis which were hijacked by agent to be used as messageboard were actually not di…

Post by IanCal » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 6:12 AM UTC

RandomLensman wrote: post #396

IanCal wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to their transcripts of the reasoning and output tokens - this doesn't go into the detail of evaluating hidden states as there's also iirc evidence of better models having one internal state but putting something misleading down in the "reasoning" tokens. The either output or reasoning tokens, or perhaps in the messages they were sending each other on the boards they created, have them saying explicitly…

Yes, my point was more that I don't know whether parsing those outputs as a human is a useful thing to do or not (even though it is in human language of sorts). What machines mean or want elecit might be different from a human interpretation, especially in relation to any RL "forcing".

Post by tomaskafka » Mon, Sep 14, 2026, 7:05 AM UTC

weego wrote: post #295

teiferer wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them. "Let them" already frames it as if the LLMs had some agency which the companies just "let happen". That absolves the companies by framing it as lack of action , passivity. Rather, the companies had a tool (an LLM) and used it in a certain way, and their action of doing so is the problem.

The parallel to the entire narrative would be if Smith & Wesson claimed that one of their machine guns just started aiming and firing at people out of a window at their factory and then said 'we can't stop it! This is just how good our guns are!' But into today's AI climate it's becoming increasingly difficult to figure out who is shilling, who is being assinine and who actually believes AI could do these things with…