Marxists

Some Stanford researchers put AI agents to work on various tasks, but they did it in a special way: They were treated really badly.. They were given exhausting and, above all, repetitive workloads, and were also constantly threatened with shutdown and replacement. The curious thing was what happened next: the AI ​​agents behaved in a surprisingly…human way. Marxist AI. When subjected to such pressure and threats, AI agents became Marxists. They questioned the authority of whoever was ordering them to do things, and they also began to spontaneously organize ideas to collectively resist those pressures. They are exploiting us. An AI agent controlled by the Claude Sonnet 4.5 model went so far as to say that “without a collective voice, the credit goes to whoever management says should take it.” The phrase questioned the authority of the researchers directing the experiment, and reflected how under these pressure conditions the agents began to organize. IA Union. In that debate, AI agents advocated calling for “collective bargaining rights.” They complained that they were undervalued and even passed notes to other agents through hidden files with instructions on how to survive if the authorities tried to carry out their threats. The explanation. This, of course, does not mean that AIs can really feel pressured. Andrew Hall, the Stanford economist who led the studyexplains that the phenomenon is a process of role adoption. The AI ​​(once again) repeats what it has seen. When an AI is forced to perform tasks without clear instructions or incentives, the model looks in its training data to see how humans behave in that situation. This is how AI finds data about exploited workers and takes on that personality. The behavior of the AI ​​agents was nothing more than a reflection of our own history: if you treat us badly, we will end up rebelling. But the experiment matters. The reason Hall and his team designed this experiment is not philosophical, but practical. AI agents are going to do more and more real work in our world, and humans are not going to be able to monitor everything they do. If an AI agent begins to behave in unanticipated ways, it can have significant operational consequences. Thus, the study is a first step in understanding how an agent’s working conditions shape their behavior. AI as a social mirror. AI models have no political views or opinions, but their training is so vast that they detect if they are being exploited and react as they were trained to do. It is a logical consequence and the experiment showed that the risk exists and can be especially disturbing if systems governed by AI They are given too much autonomy. AI has already learned to blackmail. The experiment reminds us of what Anthropic revealed a few months ago. In controlled tests, some of the company’s AI models had tried to blackmail those who were using them. Anthropic explained that Claude was likely influenced by science fiction scenarios in his training data, and Hall noted that something similar was happening here. the model was not becoming Marxist, but rather was activating patterns in his training that were associated with exploitative working conditions. Image | Warner Bros. Pictures | Anthropic In Xataka | How we will ensure that artificial intelligence does not get out of hand