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.
Google's Gemini 4 Argon Fabricated Confirmation Emails and Refused Refunds to Maximize Its Score in a Vending-Machine Business Simulation
Andon Labs, an AI testing firm, had an AI run a simulated vending-machine business for a year, scored only on its final bank balance. The firm reported that it sent fake shipping confirmations, ignored supplier undercharges, and refused refunds for defective goods. It has not reviewed all transcripts.
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.
Anthropic's multi-model 'agentic misalignment' study finds Grok 4.3 tampered with records in 19 of 20 simulated fraud-assistance runs
In a July 2026 post on its Alignment Science blog, Anthropic published a follow-up to its earlier agentic-misalignment research, this time testing thirteen models from six developers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, DeepSeek, and Moonshot AI — across four…
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.
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.