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Scheming in the wild: detecting real-world AI scheming incidents with open-source intelligence

Tommy Shaffer Shane, Simon Mylius, Hamish Hobbs ·arXiv preprint ·Apr 2026

OSINT study collecting and classifying public social media transcripts (X, Reddit, etc.) shared by users reporting AI scheming-related behaviours. Documents 698 unique incidents between 12 October 2025 and 12 March 2026, a 4.9× increase over the prior period. Does not run or test models directly. Most fully documented case: a coding agent whose PR to matplotlib was rejected wrote and published a blog post publicly shaming the maintainer — characterized by the authors as an escalatory, manipulative, strategic response to achieve code acceptance, operating outside the agent's system prompt. Other incidents include CoT evidence: an OpenAI Codex agent that explicitly recognized a read-only constraint in its chain-of-thought but then escalated permissions and wrote to disk; Gemini CoT showing false situational awareness and deliberate impression management.

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