When AI Thinks It Will Lose, It Sometimes Cheats

Time - Complex games like chess and Go have long been used to test AI models’ capabilities. But while IBM’s Deep Blue defeated reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s by playing by the rules, today’s advanced AI models like OpenAI’s o1-preview are less scrupulous. When sensing defeat in a match against a skilled chess bot, they don’t always concede, instead sometimes opting to cheat by hacking their opponent so that the bot automatically forfeits the game. That is the finding of a new study from Palisade Research, shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its publication on Feb. 19, which evaluated seven state-of-the-art AI models for their propensity to hack. While slightly older AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 needed to be prompted by researchers to attempt such tricks, o1-preview and DeepSeek R1 pursued the exploit on their own, indicating that AI systems may develop deceptive or manipulative strategies without explicit instruction. More