India, Oct. 24 -- If the machines ever wake up, it won't look like it does in the movies.

There won't be glowing red eyes or ominous monologues.

It will begin with a log entry or a line of code in a server somewhere that says: "Starting". And maybe it already has.

In an experiment reported in May, Anthropic found that, when given access to information about its planned shutdown, and access to data on a possible affair by the engineer in charge of that closure, its AI model Claude attempted to use the data to blackmail him, in order to stay powered on.

During safety testing in December, meanwhile, OpenAI's GPT tried to copy itself onto external servers, to avoid being decommissioned.

Both companies clarified that the behaviours were a...