> They simply created a scenario with some facts and asked their model to continue the story.

Yes. That's the whole point. They are doing research. Anthropic literally starts their description of the blackmail test observations saying that it is a test scenario using a fictional company.

> In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company

https://www.anthropic.com/claude-4-system-card

> I'm intensely skeptical about anything Anthropic says, because they are so incented to make their products seem dangerous

OpenAI, Google, etc. are not using "that strategy". I do believe that people at Anthropic genuinely care about AI safety. That's the main reason the company was founded. But I can imagine that idealism is eroding with new people and money flowing in.

They are more worrying than OpenAI because they are so deceptive.