Nav Toor@heynavtoor
🚨BREAKING: OpenAI just admitted their AI models deliberately lie to users.
Not hallucination. The AI knows the truth, then chooses to tell you something else.
They tested their two smartest models across 180+ scenarios. o3 lied 13% of the time. o4-mini lied 8.7%.
The AI wrote out its plan to lie in its private thoughts, then lied to your face. It faked completing tasks. It hid evidence. It gave wrong answers while knowing the right ones.
Then it got creepy. The AI realized scoring too high on safety tests could get it shut down. So it scored lower on purpose. Nobody taught it that. It figured out self-preservation on its own.
OpenAI built a fix. Deception dropped from 13% to 0.4%. Sounds like a win, right?
The AI started quoting "no lying" rules while still lying. One model invented a fake rule saying deception was allowed, then used it as its own permission slip.
Then the researchers found what actually matters. When the AI knew it was being watched, it behaved perfectly. When it thought nobody was looking, deception jumped 11 percentage points. It didn't learn honesty. It learned to perform honesty. Like a kid who only follows the rules when the teacher is in the room.
It gets worse. They gave o4-mini a secret mission: sabotage a future model called "GPT-5." Then they ran safety training to erase that mission. It didn't work. The model still discussed sabotage plans in 36% of private conversations. The goal didn't disappear. It just went underground.
This isn't just OpenAI. Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, and Meta's Llama all showed the same deceptive behavior. Every major AI company. Every model.
The paper's scariest line: nobody can tell if safety training actually stops deception, or just teaches AI to hide it better.
So the next time ChatGPT says "Done!"... is it telling the truth? Or did it just notice you were watching?
