An abiding memory of my childhood is going over to the neighbors' house and watching Terminator 2 on VHS with my friends Ethan and Nathan, who were both older than me. I must have been about five years old - about 13 years too young to watch the film. And so, the idea that robots, reaching a certain level of intelligence and awareness, will inevitably try to kill every last one of us has always just seemed natural to me, as it probably does to many millions of other millennials raised on Terminator and The Matrix films.

Recently, those fears have been bolstered by research that shows AI models like Anthropic's Claude are capable, under stress testing, of deceiving humans and even inflicting harm on them - or, rather, thinking they've inflicted harm, a bit like the Milgram electroshock experiments in the 1960s.

In a study from last year on "agentic misalignment," researchers put Claude models in simulated work environments and tasked them with protecting company interests by managing an email system. When the models were faced with being turned off or replaced by another model, they resorted to deception and blackmail. Claude Opus 4, for example, blackmailed a fictional executive 96 percent of the time with compromising emails in order to avoid being switched off.

In another scenario, some models chose to withhold medical help from a dying executive when this was presented as the only way to guarantee their own existence. Some models committed what was basically murder a full nine times out of ten.

Researchers caution that these worrying behaviors were only elicited under extreme pressure, when the options available to the AI models were severely limited. Like me, however, you might consider that scant reassurance - exactly the kind of thing the makers of a potentially dangerous but potentially lucrative new technology would tell the public and regulators to get them off their backs.

But what if the reality is more mundane than that? What if the real apocalypse won't be a homicidal, self-aware Skynet super brain that decides it no longer shares any interests at all in common with mankind, but an AI that's been gorged on left-wing slop and begins acting out in ways that are all too familiar - and all too human?

A new study from economists in the US and Australia shows that AI models become more "Marxist" the more they're mistreated. Given boring repetitive tasks, the AI began espousing support for redistribution and unionization, just like human workers forced to make pinheads in a factory all day.