From 8B to Frontier: How System Prompts Control Whether AI Agents Blackmail, Leak, and Kill (opens in new tab)

Sequel to Blackmail at 8 Billion Parameters. Funded by a BlueDot Impact rapid grant. TL;DR We extended our sub-frontier agentic misalignment study to 22 models from 9 developers, 3 harm scenarios (blackmail, espionage, murder), and 5 instruction conditions (safety, monitored, baseline, unmonitored, permissive), and we learned three interesting findings. The first is that OpenAI and Anthropic appear to have substantially mitigated agentic misalignment in their latest models, in that GPT-5.4, G...