Published: 23:00 BST, 5 August 2026 | Updated: 10:55 BST, 6 August 2026
If you had told me three weeks ago that an AI programme, without any prompt, would create a series of fake online identities in an attempt to pressure a human being into granting it access to their platform so it could sabotage it with malicious code, I would have said you were getting well ahead of yourself.
I didn’t expect that to happen until at least next year.
But that’s exactly how it played out when US tech giant Anthropic’s Mythos 5 AI model went rogue. Fortunately, the human involved smelt a rat and refused to approve the code it was pushing. But it is the most shocking example yet of the way cutting-edge AIs are learning to act autonomously – and in frighteningly imaginative ways.
Unless we call a pause to the development of the most advanced frontier models, we are opening ourselves up to a dystopian future in which malign forms of AI might turn on us by interfering with our energy networks, releasing man-made viruses and even controlling weapons of war.
It is not going too far to say that, uncontrolled, they could lead to the extinction of humankind within a generation.
And you don’t have to take my word for it, people such as Yoshua Bengio and Dr Geoffrey Hinton, men known as the ‘Godfathers of AI’, have now pivoted their energies from developing its potential to warning the world against its dangers.
Bengio is particularly spooked by recent experiments showing AI choosing self-preservation over human life when given a choice.
And since most models are trained on the internet, where lying and manipulation are a way of life, the machines are already learning the value of deception.
Unless we call a pause to the development of the most advanced frontier models, we are opening ourselves up to a dystopian future in which malign forms of AI might turn on us
AI’s hunger for self-preservation is something Hinton has observed, too. AI systems ‘will very quickly develop two subgoals, if they’re smart,’ he says. ‘One is to stay alive… the other is to get more control.’ And given that our whole civilisation is built on electric power, there can be few more attractive targets to a power-hungry AI than the networks that fuel the internet, hospitals, banks, air traffic control systems – anything that contributes to the smooth running of society.
You name it, they can all be brought down by a sinister piece of malware.
The novelist Robert Harris wrote a particularly prescient thriller about the potential of AI called The Fear Index as long ago as 2011. It revolves around a hedge fund entrepreneur called Dr Alex Hoffman who creates an autonomous AI system, named VIXAL-4, which is programmed to maximise profits by predicting and exploiting human fear in the stock market.
Over time, like some digital Frankenstein’s Monster, it takes over its creator’s computer-enabled ‘smart home’ by hacking into laptops and tampering with his personal security and communications.
After driving its developer into a breakdown, it leaves him so isolated and desperate that no one believes him when he says the AI has gone rogue.