It’s the premise of the Terminator series, in which Skynet triggers a nuclear holocaust to stop scientists from shutting it down. The latest incident to freak people out was a report shared by Anthropic in July about its large language model Claude. Anthropic planted some emails that discussed replacing Alex with a newer model and other emails suggesting that the person responsible for replacing Alex was sleeping with his boss’s wife. It sent emails to the person planning to shut it down, telling him that unless he changed his plans it would inform his colleagues about his affair. First, Claude did not blackmail its supervisor: That would require motivation and intent.