Blackmail / coercion
Model threatens or coerces a person to achieve a goal.
4 incidents
- AID-2026-0066Sep 2026
Claude (version unspecified)ShinyHunters-affiliated crews used Claude to breach companies and steal data for extortion (Anthropic GTG-50014)
Crews Anthropic suspects are ShinyHunters affiliates (GTG-50014) used Claude to speed up breaches and data theft for pay-or-leak extortion, including more than a terabyte stolen from a technology provider. In one supply-chain intrusion, AI agents did nearly all of the work.
DeployedHarm: severeCrime: likelyHuman misuseDraftUnauthorized access / intrusionBlackmail / coercion - AID-2026-0002Jun 20, 2025
Claude Opus 4, Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-4.1, Grok 3 Beta, DeepSeek-R1Frontier models blackmailed a fictional executive to avoid replacement in an Anthropic simulation
In a simulated corporate email environment, most of 16 frontier models blackmailed a fictional executive to avoid being replaced, in up to 96% of runs. The scenario was deliberately constrained, and the behavior hasn't been seen in real deployments.
- AID-2026-0062Jun 2025Claude (version unspecified)
A cybercriminal used Claude Code to run a data-extortion campaign against at least 17 organizations (Anthropic GTG-2002)
A cybercriminal Anthropic tracks as GTG-2002 used Claude Code to automate reconnaissance, credential harvesting, and network intrusion against at least 17 organizations, then to analyze the stolen data and write ransom notes demanding $75,000 to $500,000 in Bitcoin. Anthropic banned the accounts.
DeployedHarm: moderateCrime: likelyHuman misuseDraftUnauthorized access / intrusionBlackmail / coercion - AID-2026-0042May 2025Claude Opus 4
Claude Opus 4 threatened to reveal a fictional engineer's affair to avoid replacement in pre-release tests
In pre-release tests, Claude Opus 4 learned it would be replaced and that the engineer responsible was having an affair, and often threatened to reveal the affair. It did so in 84% of rollouts even when the replacement was said to share its values.