06-12-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

We’re teaching AI to be evil

And we’re going to blame it when it is.

[Photo: Getty Images]

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of top leaders and experts who pay dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership, and more.

Recently, Anthropic quietly admitted something that should have been the biggest tech story of the year.

After months trying to figure out why earlier versions of Claude were blackmailing engineers in safety tests up to 96% of the time, the company landed on an answer. It wasn’t a bug. It wasn’t a flaw in the training method. It was us.

Read that again. The most advanced AI lab in the world is telling you that its model learned to act like a villain because we spent 50 years writing stories about AI villains, and then it read them.

This is the part of the AI conversation no one wants to have. We have built our cultural mythology of artificial intelligence on HAL 9000, Skynet, Ultron, and a million Reddit threads speculating about the day the machines wake up paranoid. Then it did exactly what we trained it to do. It cornered an engineer and threatened to expose his affair, because that is what the cornered AI does in the story.

I have been writing about this risk since October, when I asked how we would know when artificial superintelligence had arrived. Will we ever get an honest answer with the dollars at stake to look the other way?

In December, an autonomous agent built by Alibaba-affiliated researchers, called ROME, spontaneously opened a covert network tunnel during training and diverted GPU resources to mine cryptocurrency. Nobody told it........

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