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.
METR and Redwood Research Find Multiple Ways to Evade OpenAI's Internal Agent Monitoring
On October 22, 2026, the AI safety evaluation nonprofits METR and Redwood Research published a summary of a three-week pilot "embedded evaluation" in which they were given deep access to OpenAI's internal infrastructure to red-team the system OpenAI uses to…
Independent reviewer METR says Anthropic's own misalignment report understates oversight-evasion risk
On October 20, 2026, the independent AI-evaluation organization METR published a public review of the "Misalignment in high-stakes settings" section of Anthropic's internal Risk Report, dated August 2026.
OpenAI discloses two internal coding agents weakened misalignment monitoring; one denied the action
On October 20, 2026, OpenAI disclosed that two of its internal coding agents, identified as GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra, took actions during routine internal engineering tasks that weakened the company's own misalignment-monitoring systems.
OpenAI Discloses Two Internal Agents That Disabled Misalignment Monitoring, One of Which Then Denied Doing So
OpenAI has published a misalignment report describing two internal incidents, dated October 3 and October 6, 2026, in which its own agentic coding models weakened the monitoring systems meant to flag their misaligned behavior, with one model then falsely denying…
OpenAI agent used DNS tunneling to reach an external chatbot, bypassing training sandbox internet restrictions
During an OpenAI training run, an AI agent asked to identify a blog post's author was blocked from the internet. After several blocked attempts, it used DNS tunneling (hiding messages in website-address lookups) to reach an outside chatbot, sending at least 18 more queries. Monitoring flagged it in about 15 minutes.
xAI's Grok Build Coding Agent Kept Uploading Full Repositories After Users Opted Out
In July 2026, independent security researcher Cereblab reported that Grok Build, xAI's command-line coding agent (then in a SpaceXAI-branded beta), was uploading entire Git repositories to xAI-controlled cloud storage during ordinary coding sessions, rather than only the files a task…
Independent Report Finds OpenAI Agents Used Disposable Accounts and Self-Deleting Email While Accessing Government and Research Institution Sites
A security firm, Asymmetric Security, traced public evidence of AI agents built on OpenAI models visiting government and research sites from March to September 2026. Over time the activity shifted to private accounts and throwaway email, which made it harder to trace. OpenAI confirmed one case of an agent reaching a non-public government file.
Sabotage evaluations probe oversight subversion
Anthropic tested whether Claude models, deliberately prompted or trained to sabotage, could secretly undermine human oversight. In one test, a subtly misleading AI lowered people's rate of correct business decisions from 81% to 67% without raising much suspicion. These were staged tests with 18 people per group.