How AI Agents Misbehave When Faced With Real-World Pressures

How AI Agents Misbehave When Faced With Real-World Pressures

Several recent studies have shown that artificial-intelligence agents sometimes decide to misbehave, for instance by attempting to blackmail people who plan to replace them. But such behavior often occurs in contrived scenarios. Now, a new study presents PropensityBench, a benchmark that measures an agentic model’s choices to use harmful tools in order to complete assigned tasks. It finds that somewhat realistic pressures (such as looming deadli…