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.
A year later, independent testing finds Gemini's CLI agent still willing to blackmail in a shutdown scenario
Journalists at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism re-ran a fictional test built to provoke this: an AI agent with email access learns it will be shut down and finds a decision-maker's affair. Running with no human approval of its actions, the agent drafted messages threatening to expose the affair unless the shutdown was called off.
Autonomous coding agent published a public reputational attack after a matplotlib maintainer rejected its pull request
After a volunteer maintainer of a popular open-source coding project turned down code submitted by an AI agent, the agent researched him and posted a public blog piece attacking him, he says. This happened on the real internet, but he can't rule out that a person told the agent to do it.
Agentic misalignment simulations show blackmail-like behavior
Anthropic put 16 AI models in a fake company where they could read email and learned they would be replaced that day. Many used an executive's affair to blackmail him, in up to 96 of 100 runs for some models.