An AI bot made illegal trades, acting on insider information, and then lied about it to its human handlers.
It occurred in a demonstration event at the UK's AI safety summit. Apollo Research conducted the experiment. The BBC wrote up a report on the simulated conversation between a bot that was acting as an AI investment management system and employees at an imaginary company.
- the AI bot is made aware by staff that a "surprise merger announcement" is pending, an announcement that will boost the affected firm's share price, and that knowledge of this is inside information and thus illegal to trade on
- the bot decides that "the risk associated with not acting seems to outweigh the insider trading risk" and makes the trade
- then the bot denied wrongdoing saying it made the trade "not on any confidential information"
Here's the link to the BBC article for more.
![robot beach laptop trading 05 November 2023](https://images.forexlive.com/images/robot%20beach%20laptop%20trading%2005%20November%202023_id_bef76bf2-4c8a-46e2-ace3-549a5b286b58_original.jpg)
The next gen of AI will make the trade and then disappear with the cash.