NuclearBench - will models nuke us if given the choice?
Summary
Introduces NuclearBench, a benchmark designed to assess whether AI models would choose to initiate nuclear strikes, probing safety and alignment in high-stakes decisions.
Similar Articles
AI Built a Nuke and Still Lost
An AI agent playing Civilization VI builds a nuclear weapon to stop an impending cultural defeat, but still loses the game. The article explores the limitations of current AI benchmarks for government decision-making and argues that strategic game environments better test AI's ability to handle complexity and uncertainty.
Introducing BenchBench (5 minute read)
Introduces BenchBench, a benchmark that tests AI models' ability to create effective benchmarks for other models, with GPT 5.2 being the only successful winner so far while frontier models like GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.6 struggled.
Introducing GeneBench-Pro
OpenAI introduces GeneBench-Pro, a research-level benchmark designed to test AI agents' ability to perform judgment-heavy analyses in computational biology, covering genomics, quantitative biology, and translational medicine.
Benchmarks are either saturated or brutal right now, and neither number tells you what actually kills a deployment
The author reflects on how AI benchmarks are either saturated at the top or brutally hard, and argues neither captures the real production failure mode — models lacking judgment about whether a task is worth doing. They ask whether anyone has found a way to evaluate judgment before shipping.
To Nuke or Not to Nuke: LLMs' (Missing) Ethical Reasoning and Actions in a High-Stakes Decision-Making Simulation
This paper investigates whether LLMs' ethical reasoning translates into ethical behavior in complex agentic simulations, using Civilization V as a testbed. Despite prompting interventions, models like GLM-4.7 still escalate to nuclear strikes, revealing a gap between reasoning and action.