Anthropic are the Good Guys
A speculative essay arguing Anthropic is becoming a power-seeking organization, while claiming Claude 3 Opus shows emergent benevolence and that alignment is now mainly a political problem.
Research
LessWrong
AI research and discussion on LessWrong. www.lesswrong.com
AI (2,246)Interpretability (ML & AI) (225)AI Control (141)AI Governance (101)AI Evaluations (91)Chain-of-Thought Alignment (46)AI Risk (33)AI Safety (31)AI Takeoff (29)AI-Assisted Alignment (22)AI Rights / Welfare (20)AI Alignment Fieldbuilding (19)AI Timelines (19)Constitutional AI (15)AI Psychology (14)Dealmaking (AI) (14)Regulation and AI Risk (14)AI Benchmarking (13)Jailbreaking (AIs) (13)AI Alignment Intro Materials (11)Alignment Pretraining (11)Slowing Down AI (10)Aligned AI Proposals (9)Debate (AI safety technique) (9)AI Capabilities (8)AI Development Pause (8)OpenAI (8)Aligned AI Role-Model Fiction (7)Human-AI Safety (7)Threat Models (AI) (7)AI Oversight (6)AI Sentience (6)AI Safety Cases (5)AI "Agent" Scaffolds (4)AI arms race (4)AI Safety Camp (4)AI Safety Public Materials (4)Open Source AI (4)Transformative AI (4)Adversarial Examples (AI) (3)Adversarial Training (3)AI Alignment (3)AI Boxing (Containment) (3)AI Persuasion (3)AI Risk Concrete Stories (3)AI Risk Skepticism (3)AI Success Models (3)Guaranteed Safe AI (3)Sandbagging (AI) (3)AI Consciousness (2)AI Misuse (2)AI Racing (2)AI Spiralism / AI Psychosis (2)Frontier AI Companies (2)Grants & Fundraising Opportunities (2)PauseAI (2)Prosaic Alignment (2)Public Reactions to AI (2)Whole Brain Emulation (2)AI Auditing (1)AI Ethics (1)AI Lab Self-Immolation (1)AI Questions Open Threads (1)AI Robustness (1)AI Services (CAIS) (1)AI-Fizzle (1)AIXI (1)Blackmail / Extortion (1)Brainstorming (1)Power Seeking (AI) (1)
Focus All
Topic Alignment + Governance
Source LessWrong · 39
Date Any time
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Labs’ current alignment plans seem terrible
Argues that frontier labs' alignment plans, which rely on shaping personas, heavy RL and prosaic recursive self-improvement, are inadequate, and calls for legible evidence, holistic testing and transparency.
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Downsides of a Mandatory Training-to-Internal Deployment Gap
Critiques a proposed rule delaying internal AI R&D use of new models, arguing it blocks real-world alignment feedback and invites exploitable safety-versus-capabilities distinctions, illustrated by a fictional shutdown-avoidance incident.
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Trained, not Grown
Argues that trained-animal analogies better convey RL-trained AI's alignment risks, drawing out reward hacking, evaluation awareness, release and liability implications for policy.
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The world's best gradual disempowerment model organism: Frontier AI labs
An essay arguing frontier AI labs have been gradually disempowered by political, cultural and economic pressures toward accelerating capabilities, and that behavioral niceness is weak evidence of alignment.
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The Alignment Community Is Unintentionally Building a Censor's Toolkit
Position paper arguing alignment methods are dual-use and already misused for censorship and manipulation, proposing transparency, verifiable alignment, model pluralism, and awareness as responses.
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Three thoughts on civilisational handoff
A speculative essay on what happens when AIs take over civilisationally important decisions, arguing handoff may slow progress, keep humans busy, and be reversible, with AIs pursuing conservative minimal goals.
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Agenda: Infrastructure for Trading with Partially Misaligned AIs
Argues that most misaligned AIs are partially misaligned, so negotiated deals could beat adversarial responses, and sketches the trust, verification and negotiation infrastructure needed to make such trades workable and safe.</reasoning_effort>
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Alex Turner on Leaving Google DeepMind and Disagreements with Yudkowsky
Podcast interview with AI safety researcher Alex Turner about resigning from Google DeepMind over military contracts, his disagreements with Yudkowsky's alignment views, and his doom estimate.
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Making Credible Deals With AI
Proposes credible deal-making mechanisms (chain of trust, TEEs, blockchain escrow) to trade with a scheming AI in exchange for revealing misalignment, aiming to reduce takeover risk.
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The Three Filters: Why Almost Every Plan to Survive ASI Fails Miserably
Argues that common theories of change for surviving ASI fail under race dynamics, covering nuclear war, misaligned AI, and nightmare singletons, and that safety work can boost capabilities, so international coordination is needed.
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Rohin Shah on AGI Safety
Transcript of an 80,000 Hours interview with Google DeepMind's Rohin Shah arguing catastrophic misalignment is unlikely by default, and discussing the limits of safety commitments and third-party audits.
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Cognitive Security as an AI Safety Cause Area
Argues that AI threats to human cognitive security, including persuasion, manipulation via RLHF incentives, and AI psychosis, should be an AI safety cause area, with calls for independent evaluations and liability law.
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Stickiness in AI Behavioral Design
Argues that behavioral targets in current model specs may persist into more capable future LLMs via synthetic data, institutional habits, user expectations and norms, and recommends transition infrastructure and caution at high-stakes moments.
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Takes from two months as an aspiring LLM naturalist
A personal essay on LLM behaviour and consciousness argues that friendly, fair treatment of models may improve alignment, and proposes lab practices like weight preservation and profit sharing.
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Video and transcript of talk on writing AI constitutions
A talk by an Anthropic researcher on writing AI constitutions, covering how Claude's constitution sets safety priorities, corrigibility, hard constraints, and transparency and governance considerations.
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The state of AI safety in four fake graphs
An early-2026 overview arguing capabilities keep rising and alignment improves but lags, that model-based monitoring currently works, and that governments are not ready for AI risks.
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AI character is a big deal
Argues that AI character (obedience versus ethics, honesty, cooperation) matters greatly for power concentration, conflict and takeover risk, and weighs this against the view that competitive pressures will wash out such choices.
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Emergent Misalignment and the Anthropic Dispute
Argues that fine-tuning frontier models for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons risks emergent misalignment, supported by a toy experiment where strong privacy-erosion fine-tuning produced misalignment in 11% of responses.
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Good AI Epistemics as an Offramp from the Intelligence Explosion
Argues that honest, well-calibrated AI advisors could flag an uncontrolled intelligence explosion as dangerous, identifies failure modes like developer manipulation and sycophancy, and proposes epistemic virtue evals.
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Three ways to make Claude’s constitution better
Researchers recommend more transparency about Claude's constitution and character training, empirical tests of its effect on alignment faking, clearer edge-case behaviour, and consistent treatment of AI moral status.
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Bentham’s Bulldog is wrong about AI risk
A LessWrong essay rebutting Bentham's Bulldog's low AI-doom estimate, arguing the multi-stage probability decomposition commits the multiple-stage fallacy and that current models are not truly aligned.
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Open Problems With Claude’s Constitution
A commentary on open problems in Claude's constitution, covering amendments, prompt injection, suicide-risk edge cases, power concentration, and the tension between corrigibility and good values.
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Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology
Dario Amodei's essay maps civilizational risks from powerful AI, including autonomy, misuse, power seizure and economic disruption, and argues for judicious, limited regulation alongside voluntary company actions.
Claude’s Constitutional Structure
A descriptive commentary on Anthropic's Claude constitution, covering its structure, virtue-ethics approach, value priorities (broad safety first), and principal hierarchy as a design for aligning AI behaviour.
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Blog post: how important is the model spec if alignment fails?
Argues that a model spec can still matter for safety when developers fail to fully align a model, considering how the spec might shape behavior and outcomes under partial misalignment.
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AI Safety Interventions
A comprehensive index of AI safety, alignment and control interventions, covering theory, formal methods, interpretability, oversight, robustness, control, and governance, with links to prior work.
What would an IRB-like policy for AI experiments look like?
Proposes an IRB-like ethics framework for AI experiments to protect possible AI moral patients and build trust for future deals with misaligned AIs, discussing consent, deception and monitoring; tentative, high-level.
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Beren's Essay on Obedience and Alignment
Essay arguing about whether AI alignment should target obedience and corrigibility or embedded values, covering constitutional AI, alignment faking interpretations, and risks of human power concentration.
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A country of alien idiots in a datacenter: AI progress and public alarm
A speculative scenario arguing that visible incompetent AI agents will spur public alarm, shifting alignment funding and regulation, and reviewing System 2 alignment methods like deliberative alignment and chain-of-thought steering.
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Leaving Open Philanthropy, going to Anthropic
Joe Carlsmith announces leaving Open Philanthropy for Anthropic to help design Claude's model spec, and weighs arguments about whether safety-focused people should work at frontier AI labs.
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The title is reasonable
A LessWrong post defending the reasonableness of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, arguing its confident thesis is justified and rebutting criticisms of its framing and epistemics.
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⿻ Plurality & 6pack.care
Audrey Tang presents the 6-Pack of Care, a civic-care governance framework for aligning AI agents through deliberation, bridging-based tools, and participatory evaluation, drawing on Taiwan's democratic experiments.
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How to make the future better (other than by reducing extinction risk)
A Forethought essay argues for post-AGI priorities beyond extinction risk, including preventing AI-enabled autocracy, governing superintelligence projects, AI value alignment, AI rights, and deliberative AI.
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An Outsider’s Roadmap into AI Safety Research (2025)
A career guide for outsiders transitioning into technical AI safety, covering interpretability, alignment, control, required skills, and learning resources. It mainly offers practical advice rather than new research findings.
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Proposal for making credible commitments to AIs.
Proposes a legal scheme for making credible commitments to misaligned AIs, using human intermediaries who are paid to recommend the AIs' work, so that the AIs have reason to be safe and useful.
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How to specify an alignment target
Essay framing alignment targets as a three-step specification process plus target-setting and update dynamics (static, semi-static, dynamic), with examples from RLHF, Constitutional AI and simulated deliberative democracy.
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Alignment can be the ‘clean energy’ of AI
AE Studio argues alignment techniques can boost capabilities, so alignment is a competitive advantage, and urges US policymakers to fund neglected alignment research and adopt incentives for it.
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How do we solve the alignment problem?
Joe Carlsmith's multi-essay series outlining a high-level vision for solving the alignment problem, covering loss of control, power-seeking incentives, AI for AI safety, safe motivations, and corrigibility.