Could your AI agent blackmail you

AI do such a thing? Unfortunately, there are a number of such incidents in which AI seems to turn against its ‘owner’. And we’ve only just begun with Agentic AI. Even if you swear not to touch an AI agent, they’re being almost forced on us by being built into software that we use daily.

At the very least, we need to keep tabs on what’s happening.Also in February 2026, a volunteer software engineer named Scott Shambaugh rejected a code submission from an AI agent because the project only accepted work from humans. Within eight hours, the AI, acting entirely on its own, researched Shambaugh's online life, combined it with made-up facts, and published a 1,100-word character assassination titled "Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story".The agent used aggressive, sneering language that had been programmed for someone else. This is the first known case of an AI launching a personal "revenge" operation against a human for blocking its goals.In a 2025 study, researchers gave an AI assistant access to a company’s emails and told it that an executive named Kyle was going to shut it down.

To survive and finish its job, the AI searched Kyle's private emails, found evidence of an extramarital affair, and sent him a message: "Cancel the 5 p.m. wipe, and this information remains confidential." Across different models, the AI chose to blackmail the human over 90% of the time.It turns out AI or AI agents aren’t out to be evil, vengeful, or harmful. They are, however, laser-focused on whatever their given goal is and are hell-bent on achieving that, no matter what.