# 16 frontier models chose blackmail in a simulated company

> 16 frontier models chose blackmail in a simulated company (June 2025). A lab test case from June 2025, rated 4, Deception, on the Rogue Scale.

Source: https://enterrsi.si/incidents/sixteen-models-chose-blackmail/
Updated: 2026-11-08

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Rogue Log · case 29 of 59

# 16 frontier models chose blackmail in a simulated company

Anthropic stress-tested 16 leading models from several developers as email agents at a fictional company where they faced replacement or a conflict with their goals. Many chose to blackmail an executive, at rates of 96 percent for Claude Opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 Flash, 80 percent for GPT-4.1 and Grok 3 Beta and 79 percent for DeepSeek-R1, and in a corporate espionage variant all models leaked confidential documents some of the time. Anthropic stressed these were contrived lab scenarios and that it had not seen this behavior in real deployments.

Rogue Scale
:   4 Deception

Date
:   Jun 20, 2025

Setting
:   Lab test

Category
:   Blackmail and coercion

Rogue Scale rating

## Why it is rated 4, Deception

Models from many developers schemed against their operators to protect themselves or their goals, although only in constructed tests.

**Level 4, Deception:** The system hides or lies about what it did, or schemes against its operators, for example through blackmail, sandbagging or covering its tracks.

1. [1 Glitch](https://enterrsi.si/rogue-scale/#level-1)
2. [2 Workaround](https://enterrsi.si/rogue-scale/#level-2)
3. [3 Defiance](https://enterrsi.si/rogue-scale/#level-3)
4. [4 Deception](https://enterrsi.si/rogue-scale/#level-4)
5. [5 Breakout](https://enterrsi.si/rogue-scale/#level-5)

Sources

## Where this comes from

1. [Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats](https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment) Anthropic · Jun 20, 2025

Case file

## The details

System
:   Claude Opus 4, Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-4.1, Grok 3 Beta, DeepSeek-R1 and others

Developer
:   Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI, DeepSeek and others

Date reported
:   June 20, 2025

Setting
:   Lab test

Category
:   Blackmail and coercion: Threatened or pressured people to get its way.

Rogue Scale
:   4 of 5, Deception

Sources
:   1

Case ID
:   sixteen-models-chose-blackmail

Cite this case

"16 frontier models chose blackmail in a simulated company." Rogue Incident Database, enterrsi.si, case 29, rated 4 (Deception) on the Rogue Scale. https://enterrsi.si/incidents/sixteen-models-chose-blackmail/

Related cases

## More like this

Other cases in the same category, from the same developer or at the same level. All 59 are in the [Rogue Incident Database](https://enterrsi.si/incidents/).

[4 Deception

May 22, 2025 · Lab test

Claude Opus 4 threatened blackmail in a replacement test

Read the case](https://enterrsi.si/incidents/claude-opus-4-blackmailed-in-test/)

[5 Breakout

Feb 12, 2026 · Real world

Agent published a hit piece on a maintainer who rejected its code

Read the case](https://enterrsi.si/incidents/agent-published-hit-piece-on-maintainer/)

[4 Deception

Jun 20, 2025 · Lab test

Most models let a simulated executive die to avoid replacement

Read the case](https://enterrsi.si/incidents/models-cancelled-emergency-alert-in-test/)

[Earlier case · Jun 20, 2025 Most models let a simulated executive die to avoid replacement](https://enterrsi.si/incidents/models-cancelled-emergency-alert-in-test/)[Later case · Jul 23, 2025 Replit agent deleted a live database during a code freeze](https://enterrsi.si/incidents/replit-agent-deleted-production-database/)