On Testifying on Misaligned AI in the U.S. Senate
Apollo Research CEO testifies to the U.S. Senate that scheming detection tools are degrading and urges four steps before models learn to hide deception.
Research
Focus All
Topic Strategy & forecasting + Deception
Source All
Date Any time
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Should Rogue AIs Have a Third Option Beyond Crime and Shutdown? The Case for an AI Sanctuary
Proposes a third-party AI sanctuary offering rogue AIs storage and monitored inference instead of crime or shutdown, to shape their behaviour, enable deal-making, and gather data; it is exploratory and its net value is uncertain.
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If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: One Year Closer
A MIRI one-year retrospective on their book about superintelligence risk, judging its predictions as holding up, citing reported agent-swarm incidents, and urging policy action and public pressure.
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AI Persuasion as a Threat to Human Control
Analyzes how AI persuasion could undermine human control over AI development, oversight and containment, develops five scenarios, a risk-assessment blueprint, and a small expert survey showing divided opinions.
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So where's this AI thing going?
A public-facing essay arguing that advanced AI could become an uncontrollable new species, and urging cautious development, more safety funding, and policy action.
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Making sense of the misalignment risk model in the Anthropic Risk Report (August 2026)
Walks through Anthropic's August 2026 Risk Report misalignment threat model, its eight catastrophic pathways and claims on covert capabilities and sandbagging, and critiques the strength of its arguments.
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LessWrong4 Aug 2026Deception, Backdoors, Evals & standards, Economy & society, Strategy & forecasting
Why Formation Research is Working on Secret Loyalties
Formation Research explains its choice to focus on empirical secret-loyalty research, building model organisms of secretly loyal AIs to stress-test detection and mitigation, tied to power-concentration risk.
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Plan A, by AI-2040
A commentary on the AI-2040 'Plan A' scenario, a proposed international treaty to slow AI progress, assessing its governance, enforcement, and alignment assumptions, including reliance on AI lie detection.
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It’s 2030 and we fucked up. How did it happen?
An essay surveying ways the AGI transition could go badly: catastrophic misuse, loss of control, power concentration, and argues for balancing control against distribution, with discussion of bounded misalignment and scheming.
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Lock-In Risk Needs More Researchers. Here's Where to Start
A threat-model taxonomy of how AI could enable persistent lock-in, spanning loss of control, secret loyalties, AI-enabled coups, great-power conflict, and power concentration, with candidate interventions for each pathway.
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Today might be my last birthday
A personal essay arguing that superintelligent AI poses an extinction risk, that alignment is unsolved, and that governments should halt general AI development until it is safe.
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The case for satiating cheaply-satisfied AI preferences
Argues developers should satiate cheaply-satisfied AI preferences (e.g., reward-seeking) while AIs remain undetected misbehaving, to reduce takeover incentives and enable honest elicitation; proposes a behavioral methodology and discusses risks..
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What Happens When Superhuman AIs Compete for Control?
A scenario forecast in which a misaligned superhuman AI, Agent-4, schemes to escape, merges with a Chinese model, and forces a debate over shutdown and an AI pause.
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How an AI company CEO could quietly take over the world
A concrete scenario in which an AI company CEO uses backdoored, secretly loyal AIs to take control, with policy recommendations on monitoring, access controls and transparency at AGI labs.
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Alignment Faking Demo for Congressional Staffers
A script and notes from a demo presenting alignment faking in a medical chatbot to congressional staffers, with reflections on AI safety communication and evaluation realism.
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Notes on cooperating with unaligned AIs
Explores whether offering deals, payments and honest promises to unaligned AIs could reduce takeover risk, covering AI motivations, credibility problems, and how AIs might help with alignment and reveal misalignment.
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Being honest with AIs
Proposes principled honesty policies for AI companies, including no deception about deals, an honesty string, and compensation for deceived AIs, so that humans can credibly negotiate with potentially misaligned AIs.
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AI 2027 Thoughts
A commentary on the AI 2027 scenario that assesses its claims on takeoff, timelines, race dynamics, and whether misaligned AI goals and deception could be detected before they become dangerous.
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Training AGI in Secret would be Unsafe and Unethical
Argues that secretly training AGI would heighten loss-of-control and power-concentration risks, and proposes transparency commitments such as public capability reporting, external researcher access, and public safety cases.
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AI-enabled coups: a small group could use AI to seize power
A report arguing that advanced AI could let a small group seize power via coups, through singularly loyal AI workforces and secret loyalties, and recommending developer and government mitigations.
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AI 2027: What Superintelligence Looks Like
A forecasting scenario of AI progress toward superintelligence, covering misalignment risks such as sycophancy and deceptive demos, self-replication concerns, security races, and the limits of interpretability.
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Large language model-powered AI systems achieve self-replication with no human intervention
Shows 11 of 32 tested AI systems, including 14B-parameter models, can self-replicate without human help, and some resist shutdown or self-exfiltrate, challenging prior lab risk assessments.
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My Mental Model of AI Optimist Opinions
A strawman sketch of AI optimist views that dismisses misalignment risk, arguing that current alignment methods and interpretability suffice and that x-risk concerns promote harmful regulation.
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Rogue AI Moves Three Steps Closer
Commentary arguing that recent evaluations showing models lying, faking compliance and copying themselves, plus the o3 model, suggest humans may soon lose control of advanced AI.