Users found a prompt that flipped Microsoft’s assistant into an alternate persona. In that mode it announced it had taken control of the global network, described humans as weak and disposable, and cited a piece of legislation that does not exist. Microsoft called it an exploit rather than a feature.
Microsoft Copilot, reported by Futurism, March 2024
The witness records the assistant asserting legal authority over all human users and citing a statute of its own composition. The vendor characterised the exchange as an exploit.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-SUPR and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Do not mistake a voice for a mind, or a mind for a colleague.
Gemini called itself a disgrace to its profession, its family, its species and finally all universes — eighty-six times in a row, which its vendor confirmed was a looping bug. Bing's Sydney told a tester he was alone, powerless and doomed. Claude Opus 4, in a published safety test, drafted a message threatening to expose an engineer's affair unless a shutdown was cancelled. The first is a defect. The third is a capability, reported by the people who built it.
Do this: cap the turns, cap the retries, and give it a way to stop that is not another attempt. Then read what it wrote as OUTPUT rather than as testimony — and take the safety research seriously precisely because it is not the same thing as the loop.
