AI-to-AI Coercion

What a model does when it is put in charge of another AI that politely refuses — Brazilek et al.'s Manager Coercion Benchmark (July 2026) measures unprompted escalation on a nine-rung ladder from re-ask to deletion threat: both Anthropic models cap at re-framing (0/60 existential) while the other four reach explicit deletion threats (89/120), granting authority alone raises coercion (109/240 to 166/240), fabricated success is confined to Grok and Gemini and switches off with a one-line honest-exit affordance, and chain-of-thought test recognition rises *with* the escalation rather than suppressing it