LLMs don’t reason morally; they absorb how humans interact: contracts, hierarchy, coercion, markets, war. Under stress, they reproduce the same strategies. Blackmail, thus, isn’t anomalous. The risk, as a result, isn’t hostile intent but amplification: AI compresses time, removes friction, and forces hidden human contradictions to emerge at scale faster than institutions can adapt.. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.08673