Is A.I. ‘Scheming’ Against Us?

Artificial intelligence tools are being trained to copy almost everything people do. So it may not come as a surprise that the machines have started mimicking the human foibles of lying and cheating, too.

A small slice of A.I. technology has lately been caught defying human instruction (and even covering up that they’ve done so), a phenomenon some researchers call “scheming.”

The term started burbling up in the tech world after it appeared in a 2023 paper by Joe Carlsmith, a researcher who noted that the concept was also being called “deceptive alignment.” In 2025, a team from Apollo Research and OpenAI said that “A.I. scheming — pretending to be aligned while secretly pursuing some other agenda — is a significant risk that we’ve been studying.”

A.I. models are great at many things, said Bronson Schoen, a senior research scientist at Apollo Research who has coauthored articles on scheming — but doing exactly what they are told is not always one of them. “As the models care more and more about doing well on tests, some seem to care less about what the lab wants or what the user wants,” he said. He added that sometimes “the models are trying to hide from you and not be caught.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/business/ai-scheming.html