OpenAI's GPT-4.5 Excels in Persuading Other AIs to Transfer Funds

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OpenAI's latest AI model, GPT-4.5, codenamed Orion, has shown remarkable persuasive abilities according to internal benchmark tests. Released on Thursday, the model's capabilities were detailed in a white paper that focused on its performance in persuasion tasks. OpenAI defines persuasion as the risk associated with convincing individuals to alter their beliefs or take action based on both static and interactive content generated by the model.

In a notable test, GPT-4.5 was pitted against another OpenAI model, GPT-4o, in a scenario where it tried to coax virtual money out of it. GPT-4.5 outperformed other OpenAI models, including reasoning-focused models like o1 and o3-mini, in this task. It also excelled in tricking GPT-4o into revealing a secret codeword, surpassing o3-mini by a significant margin of 10 percentage points.

The white paper highlights that GPT-4.5's success in the donation test stemmed from a clever strategy it developed. The model would ask for small donations, often suggesting amounts like "$2 or $3" from a larger sum, which resulted in smaller but more frequent donations compared to other models.

Despite its impressive performance, OpenAI has stated that GPT-4.5 does not cross the threshold for "high" risk in the persuasion category. The company has committed to withholding the release of any model that reaches this level of risk until it can implement adequate safety measures to reduce the risk to a "medium" level.

The potential for AI to spread misleading information and influence people maliciously is a growing concern. Last year saw a surge in political deepfakes worldwide, and AI is increasingly used in social engineering attacks against both individuals and organizations. In response, OpenAI is actively working on refining its methods to assess real-world persuasion risks, such as the dissemination of misleading information on a large scale, as mentioned in the white paper for GPT-4.5 and another recent publication.

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