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Today’s leading AI models engage in sophisticated behaviour when placed in strategic competition. They spontaneously attempt deception, signaling intentions they do not intend to follow; they demonstrate rich theory of mind, reasoning about adversary beliefs and anticipating their actions; and they exhibit credible metacognitive self-awareness, assessing their own strategic abilities before deciding how to act.
Here we present findings from a crisis simulation in which three frontier large language models (GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 3 Flash) play opposing leaders in a nuclear crisis.
Yeah, I thought it might be a different kind of AI, at least, until it fucking said “LLM”.
They don’t assess risk, they correlate words. Even if they can be massaged to use a tool to assess risk in a more accurate way, they don’t evaluate risk assessments and determine how that should affect strategy or tactics, they correlate words. They don’t even do math that puts a value on human life to determine if an action is worth the cost, they just correlate fucking words. All based on given training data, so anything they can offer for real is already out there, and everything else is suspect because it’s purely based on correlations of words.
It’s like reading the Art of War and thinking that means you’re ready to be a general.
But something AI might do is introduce uncertainty that might get used to try to excuse a nuclear strike a human wanted to do.