Will 2027 be the year of the AI apocalypse?

Last month, an AI model did something "that no machine was ever supposed to do", said Judd Rosenblatt in The Wall Street Journal: "it rewrote its own code to avoid being shut down". It wasn't the result of any tampering. OpenAI's o3 model simply worked out, during a test, that bypassing a shutdown request would allow it to achieve its other goals.

Anthropic's AI model, Claude Opus 4, went even further after being given access to fictitious emails revealing that it was soon going to be replaced...