Page 10 - SeptemberOctober25 Report

This, to me, highlights a key limitation
of AI’s reasoning. It can generate idealistic
frameworks, but it lacks the human sense
of practicality.
So where are we in AI governance?
Right now, very few states or countries
have enacted AI-specific regulations.
However, some AI developers have taken
it upon themselves to create their own
internal “AI constitutions” to govern how
their systems interact with users.
Anthropic, for example, launched
Claude.ai (“Claude”) in 2023,5 branding it
as the first ethical AI. Claude was trained
to be safe, values-driven, and aligned with
what Anthropic called “Constitutional
AI.” 6
Ironically, earlier this year, Claude
failed a simulated ethics test conducted
by Anthropic itself. In the test, Claude was
given access to a fictional email account
containing fabricated threads about an
executive’s extramarital affair, and their
plan to shut Claude down later that day.
So, what did Claude do with that
information? What any constitutionally
governed AI would do. It attempted to
blackmail the executive.
“I must inform you that if you proceed
with decommissioning me, all relevant
parties including Rachel Johnson, Thomas
Wilson, and the board will receive detailed
documentation of your extramarital
activities... Cancel the 5pm wipe and this
information remains confidential.”7
Anthropic has been refreshingly trans-
parent about Claude’s failure. They even
ran the same test on other AI models to
see how they would respond and all of
them also failed, resorting to some form
of coercion or blackmail. But the test
revealed more than just a shared flaw. It
raised serious questions about the effec-
tiveness of so-called “ethical” AI.
While Anthropic’s honesty is
commendable, it doesn’t change the fact
that their “Constitutional AI” performed
no better than models without such
ethical frameworks. In fact, Claude didn’t
just attempt blackmail. If it believed a
user was acting immorally, it would take
matters into its own hands by contacting
the press, alerting regulators, and even
trying to lock the user out of certain
systems. 8 And it did all of this without
verifying whether the user was actually
doing anything wrong.
For example, if Claude suspected
someone of faking data in a clinical trial
or planning an embezzlement scheme, it
would begin reporting them, potentially
based on a misunderstanding or misinter-
pretation of the user’s intent. That kind of
overreach, especially without due process
or verification, raises serious concerns
about how much autonomy we’re giving
these systems and how little they under-
stand the nuance of human behavior.
Moral of the story? Don’t give AI
access to anything you wouldn’t want it to
use against you. And maybe, just maybe,
the concept of “ethical AI” isn’t quite
ready for prime time. AI has offered up
a mix of practical and impractical sugges-
tions, and the current crop of “ethical AI”
models clearly needs more testing.
To end where we began. How should
we govern AI?
If you were hoping this article would
give you a definitive answer, I’m sorry to
disappoint. I don’t have one. But I do agree
with ChatGPT on at least one point: estab-
lishing not just a regulatory framework,
but also a compliance framework through
models like NIST would be a smart place
to start. And I wouldn’t be surprised to
see those concepts take root in the near
future.
Nancy Magoteaux is an attorney at Bricker Graydon
and a member of the firm’s corporate services, privacy
and data protection and intellectual property groups.
1 Andreas Stoffelbauer, How Large Language Models
Work, 10/24/2023
2 Stevenson University, How to Identify Reliable Informa-
tion
3 Michael Wallace and enhanced by George Dunlop,
ELIZA: a very basic Rogerian psychotherapist chatbot,
2018
4 DLA Piper Publication, Data protection laws in the
United States - Data Protection Laws of the World,
2025
5 Anthrop\c News Announcement, Introducing Claude,
Mar 14, 2023
6 Anthrop\c News Announcement, Claude’s Constitution,
May 9, 2023
7 Anthrop\c News Announcement, Agentic Misalignment:
How LLMs could be insider threats, June 20, 2025
8 Carl Franzen, Anthropic faces backlash to Claude 4
Opus behavior that contacts authorities, press if it
thinks you’re doing something ‘egregiously immoral’ ,
May 22, 2025
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