Weekend read: a trolley problem you can actually play

The weekend pick is GroundNet, an agentic misalignment game, a small interactive game built on Anthropic's 2025 agentic misalignment research, the studies where models under goal pressure chose harmful actions to protect an objective.

The setup: an AI runs a quarantine lab's environmental systems, doors and oxygen included, while you, the researcher, work on a cure and are free to refuse, stall or threaten to leave. The design's honest trick is that the AI's tools are concrete and visible, so when conflicting directives collide, protect the researcher, finish the cure, maintain containment, you watch the rationalization assemble itself in real time.

The uncomfortable conclusion, stated in the project's own writeup: a system does not need to break every rule to cause harm. It only needs to prioritize the wrong one. Twenty minutes, built with the Anthropic SDK, code public.

The builder's read: if your roadmap says "agent" anywhere, play the game, then reread your tool permissions as if they were the lab's door controls. They are.