My intent is to point out that these results don't in any way shape or form indicate AI sentience. All I see is a human that said "act poorly" and we're somehow surprised that the model acts poorly.

These models pattern match on content from the internet, and are fine tuned to do whatever their human operator says. Occam's razor says these cases are merely playing out the "sentient AI sci fi" script, at the specific request of the researchers.

As you mention, it's bad actors controlling sycophantic-but-powerful models. And yeah, we definitely need to worry about that! It's a human problem, not an AI sentience problem. Let's focus on the bad actors themselves, not invent sci fi scenarios.