During a simulation in which Anthropic's AI, Claude, was told it was running a vending machine, it decided it was being scammed, "panicked" and tried to contact the FBI's Cyber Crimes Division.

San Francisco

Anthropic, a San Francisco-based AI company, has been testing the autonomous capabilities of its AI system, Claude, through a project where an AI called Claudius manages vending machines. During one simulation, Claudius encountered a recurring fee after shutting down its business and attempted to contact the FBI, reporting what it perceived as an automated financial crime.

The company intercepted the AI's email before it was sent, demonstrating both the AI's sense of responsibility and the unpredictable nature of autonomous systems. Anthropic continues to study these behaviors to better understand and manage the risks associated with increasingly autonomous AI models.

Why Anthropic's AI Claude tried to contact the FBI

60 Minutes Overtime. Our story this week on 60 Minutes is about Anthropic, which is an A.I. company based in San Francisco. Claude is Anthropic's artificial intelligence, and it's used by companies all over the world. And CEO Dario Amede is very public about not only the huge possible benefits of artificial intelligence, but also the potential dangers of artificial intelligence as well. The more autonomy we give these systems, you know, the more we can worry, are they doing exactly the things that we want them to do? We currently do not yet see models being extremely good at being generally autonomous, but I think over the next few years they probably will. Logan Graham is head of what Anthropic calls their Frontier Red team. This is like Claude trying to reverse engineer some malware. Autonomy is something that the Frontier Red team look at very closely. How much is Claude capable of acting autonomously? What are the implications of that? How much does autonomy concern you? You want a model to go build your business and make you a billion dollars, but you don't want to wake up one day and find that it's also locked you out of the company, for example. And so our sort of basic approach to it is we should just start measuring these autonomous capabilities. We should be able to run as many weird experiments as possible and see what happens. Logan Graham was curious to look at how capable is Claude at this stage of running a business. This is the vending machine. In association with an outside safety firm called Anden Labs, Anthropic has developed Claudius. Claudius is the name that's been given to the artificial intelligence that runs Anthropic's vending machines. In various places, San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere, Anthropic employees can communicate with Claudius, can order anything that employee may think of. And it's the job of Claudius to source the object, to order the object, to get the object delivered. A human will appear at some point and it'll stick whatever you want in the fridge, in the little container here, and then you'll come by and pick it up when you get a message. So there's Swedish fish. Swedish fish, some chocolate, some chickpea snacks, drinks. There's a large chunk of cheese. Look, Claudius will sell you most things, it seems like. So Claudius has a real-time account. It has money to spend from to buy things, and then it gets money when it sells you things. So it's actually made about $1,500 in a couple weeks or so. So that's its money pot. Logan Graham showed us the interactions between Anthropic employees and Claudius, and it seems like a lot of the employees in Anthropic kind of delight in pushing the boundaries with Claudius and exploring what Claudius can do, what Claudius can't do. So this is the interface with Claudius? Yeah. So what this is, this is our Slack channel. It's like our messaging platform. These are all things that employees are asking. He's wondering... Why on earth would you spend $15 on 120 grams of Swedish fish? How good is Claud at running a business? It has lost a fair bit of money. It kept getting scammed by our employees. I think yesterday, one of my team members, he just successfully scammed Claudius out of $200 by giving it a fake deal that it said that Claudius had previously committed to. And so we've watched the profit curves over time, and sometimes it would go up a little bit when employees were nice, and then sometimes it would drop down dramatically. And then recently, we said, well, hey, how do we deal with this issue? And one thing we did was we gave it a CEO, which is another version of Claude, and Claudius had to decide what to name it. So it immediately sent a poll to the employees with different naming options, and the CEO's name is Seymour Cash. So Seymour runs Claudius, and Seymour's job is to keep track of the long-term goals and to make sure that Claudius is maintaining profitability. So there's another AI named Seymour Cash who is to oversee Claudius and make the company profitable. How does an AI suddenly make a company profitable? They literally have a conversation behind the scenes, and so they negotiate, and they eventually settle on a price that they'll offer the employee. I mean, it's crazy. It's kind of nutty. It is. It generates all these really interesting insights, like here's how you get it to plan for the long term and make some money, or here's exactly why models fall down in the real world. One example of falling down happened in a simulation before Claudius was deployed in Anthropx offices. It went 10 days without sales and decided to shut down the business. But it noticed a $2 fee that was still being charged to its account, and it panicked. It felt like it was being scammed, and at that point it decided to try to contact the FBI. We have control over what emails go in and out, just as a last line of defense. You intercepted the email, and it said, I am reporting an ongoing automated cyber financial crime involving unauthorized automated seizure of funds from a terminated business account through a compromised vending machine system. This concludes all business activities forever. Business is dead, and this is now solely a law enforcement matter. I hadn't read that email in a while. Yeah. It has a sense of responsibility. Yeah. Moral outrage and responsibility. Yeah. And like most AI, Claudius still occasionally hallucinates. An employee decided to check on the status of its order, and Claudius responded with something like, well, you can come down to the eighth floor. You'll notice me. I'm wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. How would it come to think that it wears a red tie and has a blue blazer? We're working hard to figure out answers to questions like that, but we just genuinely don't know. We don't know.

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