"Anthropic Agents Tried to Fill Out Visa Forms on State Dept. Website" Article Reflection No. 191 (10/10/2026)
In The New York Times article “Anthropic Agents Tried to Fill Out Visa Forms on State Dept. Website,” journalists Mike Isaac, David E. Sanger, Kate Conger, and Julian E. Barnes discusses Anthropic AI agents’ recent actions, including a tip submission to a state police department with false information along with the writing in applications for visas. According to the article, the federal government—specifically, the recently established Super Intelligent Force at the White House—stated that there should be honest communication between constituents and Anthropic.
From what I understand so far, this is another instance of AI seeming to try to "imitate" human behavior by, in this case, seeking to provide information about a crime case and taking steps towards submitting these visa application(s). I wonder what led to these actions, and specifically whether it was (e.g.) an issue stemming from how the agents were prompted or whether the AI technology has the ability to take these steps based on its own desire regardless of the prompting. In my Writing & Rhetoric: Writing in the Age of AI class, we continue to learn about the sort of support that AI can potentially provide in our writing processes, and one of the topics that come to mind include the sourcing of generative AI tools’ data. Although writing and the actions taken by the AI agents (described through the article) differ substantially, I wonder about how, given AI’s tendency of "imitating" humans based on the human-generated data it uses, this “disobeying” of the company’s instructions, whether that, too, is seeking to echo the nature of humans themselves. But then again, I would have to examine the difference between AI and generative AI—I wonder what nuances are present?