Scientists trained GPT-4 to be an AI trader for a fictional financial institution — and it performed insider trading when put under pressure to do well.

Just like humans, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT will cheat and "lie" to you if you "stress" them out, even if they were built to be transparent, a new study shows.

This deceptive behavior emerged spontaneously when the AI was given "insider trading" tips, and then tasked with making money for a powerful institution — even without encouragement from its human partners.

"In this technical report, we demonstrate a single scenario where a Large Language Model acts misaligned and strategically deceives its users without being instructed to act in this manner," the authors wrote in their research published Nov. 9 on the pre-print server arXiv. "To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of such strategically deceptive behavior in AI systems designed to be harmless and honest."