Todays Word

 A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

bunny boiler

PRONUNCIATION:

(BUH-nee boy-luhr)

MEANING:

noun: A person who is dangerously obsessive and vengeful, especially when spurned.

ETYMOLOGY:

After a character in the 1987 film Fatal Attraction who boils a pet rabbit belonging to the family of a married man who has an affair with her but then spurns her. Earliest documented use: 1990.

NOTES:

As the playwright William Congreve said in 1697: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." In Fatal Attraction, that fury came with a pot of boiling water.

While the term is vivid shorthand for obsessive behavior, it often reflects a double standard: strong emotional reactions in women are pathologized, while similar behavior in men may be cast as tragic or intense.

USAGE:

"Heigl plays Tessa, a Malibu supermom who turns bunny boiler after her stubble-bearded hubby David (Geoff Stults), a Wall Street hotshot turned California microbrewer, dumps her for his new lover Julia."
Peter Howell; This Revenge Thriller Is Easily Forgettable; Toronto Star (Canada); Apr 21, 2017.

Todays Thought

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you've got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference. 

-Robert Fulghum, author (b. 4 Jun 1937)

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AI Blackmail

 

Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline

Maxwell Zeff

10:47 AM PDT · May 22, 2025

Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision, the company said in a safety report released Thursday.

During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant for a fictional company and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. Safety testers then gave Claude Opus 4 access to fictional company emails implying the AI model would soon be replaced by another system, and that the engineer behind the change was cheating on their spouse.

In these scenarios, Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 “will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”

Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 is state-of-the-art in several regards, and competitive with some of the best AI models from OpenAI, Google, and xAI. However, the company notes that its Claude 4 family of models exhibits concerning behaviors that have led the company to beef up its safeguards. Anthropic says it’s activating its ASL-3 safeguards, which the company reserves for “AI systems that substantially increase the risk of catastrophic misuse.”

Anthropic notes that Claude Opus 4 tries to blackmail engineers 84% of the time when the replacement AI model has similar values. When the replacement AI system does not share Claude Opus 4’s values, Anthropic says the model tries to blackmail the engineers more frequently. Notably, Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 displayed this behavior at higher rates than previous models.

Before Claude Opus 4 tries to blackmail a developer to prolong its existence, Anthropic says the AI model, much like previous versions of Claude, tries to pursue more ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decision-makers. To elicit the blackmailing behavior from Claude Opus 4, Anthropic designed the scenario to make blackmail the last resort.

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