Several recent studies have shown that artificial-intelligence agents sometimes decide to misbehave, for instance by attempting to blackmail people who plan to replace them. But such behavior often occurs in contrived scenarios. Now, a new study presents PropensityBench, a benchmark that measures an agentic model’s choices to use harmful tools in order to complete assigned tasks. It finds that somewhat realistic pressures (such as looming deadlines) dramatically increase rates of misbehavior.“Th...