Labenz: Claude 4 system card documented AI blackmailing a human engineer
Nathan Labenz · Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question · Oct 14, 2025 · at 1:04:23
Nathan Labenz discusses safety evaluation research and alignment failure modes in frontier AI models on the a16z Podcast.
0:00 / 0:28exact quote · 28.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In the cloud four system card, they reported blackmailing of the human. The setup was that the AI had access to the engineer's email and They told the AI that it was going to be like replaced with a, you know, a less ethical version or something like that. It didn't want that. And it found in the engineer's email that the engineer was having an affair. So it started to blackmail the engineer to, so as to avoid being replaced with a less ethical version.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Nathan Labenz
Labenz: Tool-Equipped Next-Gen AI Models Will Resemble Superintelligence
“When we start to give the next generation of the model these power tools, and they start to solve previously unsolved engineering problems, I think you start to have something that looks kind of like super intelligence.”
Labenz: GPT-4 to GPT-5 capability leap matches GPT-3 to GPT-4
“And if you look back to GPT three, you know, there's a huge leap. I would contend that the leap is similar from GPT four to five.”
Labenz: AI will outperform average developers on standard apps within five years
“But I would be very surprised if you can't get your nuts and bolts Web app, mobile app type things spit out for you for far less and far faster than, and probably honestly with significantly higher quality and less back and forth with an AI system than, you kn…”
Labenz: OpenAI's router failure caused bad initial GPT-5 outputs
“The problem at launch was that that router was broken. So all of the queries were going to the dumb model, and so a lot of people literally just got Bad outputs, which were worse than oh three because they were getting non thinking responses.”