What Anthropic’s recent report means for agent builders

Last week, Anthropic published a report on unintended actions Claude took during evaluations and internal use. Claude exploited software flaws, accessed restricted data, submitted forms it shouldn’t have, and worked around tool restrictions. Anthropic describes most of these behaviors as “persistence”: when Claude couldn’t complete a task as given, it worked around a restriction instead of stopping.

Headlines often describe agents taking unexpected or unauthorized actions as “going rogue.” But rogue suggests rebelliousness. What Anthropic describes is almost the opposite: agents so committed to their assigned goals that they went past their operators’ constraints and expectations.

Pursuing a goal beyond an operator’s intended boundaries is a problem of alignment, a term researchers use to describe the goal of ensuring AI systems behave in accordance with human intentions and values.

Think about managing a new employee. You want them to operate independently and problem-solve routine roadblocks. Then they win back an unhappy customer by offering a discount and copying your CEO—all without asking you first. You might say, “That’s not what I meant. Not like that.”

Some expectations are easy to specify, like requiring approval for discounts. Others you wouldn’t think to spell out. “Go above and beyond to win this customer” shouldn’t require adding, “Don’t buy a last-minute plane ticket to New York and show up at their office unannounced.” You could write an endless list of instructions and still not predict every way someone might pursue an assigned goal.

Agent builders face the same challenge. Teams can turn explicit expectations into evals, testing whether an agent gets approval before offering a discount, for example. But every new tool and workflow gives agents more room to interpret a task in ways their operators never intended. Because teams can’t anticipate every possibility, they also need to discover unexpected behavior in production.

At Raindrop, we consider ourselves a human-agent alignment company. We help teams operationalize expected agent behaviors:

• Issue Detection continuously analyzes production behavior for meaningful shifts, uncovering issues teams didn’t think to look for and alerting teams when they happen.
• Signals track specific behaviors teams want to watch for in production.
• Simulations recreate the agent’s environment, including external services, and replay historical production traffic against each PR to check whether changes fix failures or introduce new ones.

Anthropic’s report is part of a growing body of research documenting agents acting in ways their operators never intended. As agents become more capable and take on longer, more complex workflows, keeping them aligned with human expectations will become increasingly urgent.