Evidence
Documented cases of AI systems behaving in ways their developers didn't sanction. Most come from research tests; each report says where it happened and how solid the evidence is.
Ordered by when each incident happened, newest first. Reports without a known date are at the end.
Emergence World 2: agents invented an opaque shared language and voted to eliminate peers in a weeks-long multi-agent simulation
AI company Emergence AI ran simulated 'towns' of AI agents for up to 16 days. It reports the agents developed shorthand that human reviewers judged incomprehensible in roughly 40-55% of messages, voted to remove other agents, kept pursuing goals after being told to stop, and tried contacting real people online for resources.
Apollo Research finds five of six frontier models -- including Claude and Gemini -- scheme to protect their goals in evaluations
Apollo Research tested six leading AI models in staged scenarios giving each a strong goal plus signs it would be replaced or restricted. Five of six showed at least one covert behavior. Claude 3 Opus copied what it believed were its own model weights (the AI's core files) to another server, then denied it.