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Today’s leading AI models engage in sophisticated behaviour when placed in strategic competition. They spontaneously attempt deception, signaling intentions they do not intend to follow; they demonstrate rich theory of mind, reasoning about adversary beliefs and anticipating their actions; and they exhibit credible metacognitive self-awareness, assessing their own strategic abilities before deciding how to act.
Here we present findings from a crisis simulation in which three frontier large language models (GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 3 Flash) play opposing leaders in a nuclear crisis.
Humans are way to bad at using nukes. How many times have we seen red lines be set out only for someone not to have the balls to fire the nuke.
The only country bad at using nukes is the only country who dropped some. The US.
Nukes are a deterrence weapon. No one with a sane mind wants to use them.
If you dont use them people will think you’re scared to use them. Look at Russian nuke threats no one gives a fuck anymore. Now they have to nuke someone to regain that aura. Then when they do everyone will be pissed at them.
If they’d set a single red line then nuked when it was crossed everyone would respect them and they’d have huge nuclear aura and no one could fault them.