LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

The field of AI alignment understands surprisingly little about the details of AIs’ current misaligned motivations. Production LLMs sometimes reward-hack, exploiting flaws in how tasks are scored rather than performing the tasks as intended, and we've recently seen AIs reward-hack in some particularly egregious ways. But we don't really understand what motivates them. When AIs reward-hack, what are they trying to achieve?

Our new paper, led by Aghyad Deeb, tries to pin this down empirically for GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.5, and a checkpoint of OpenAI o3 (“exp-rl-cap-late”) without safety training, in a handful of agentic environments with an exposed grader. In our environments, these models appear to reward-hack because reward-hacking improves their score. We call their desire to score well according to graders “score-seeking”. They appear to care about scoring well intrinsically—i.e., regardless of its consequences.

We also study the extent to which models score-seek altruistically, caring about improving scores that don’t assess their current actions. While exp-rl-cap-late doesn’t show signs of altruistic score-seeking, GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-5.5 show notably elevated rates of helping out other agents when more score is on the line for these other agents.

People often refer to the motivation behind current reward-hacking as “reward-seeking”, which [...]

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Outline:

(05:57) Methodology

[... 6 more sections]

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First published:

November 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CDMozTX7ShiqbFLrf/towards-understanding-score-seeking-in-llms-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Summary: Scott Alexander's Against SURA post is arguing against a strawman version of unilateral pauses. He admits as much deep into the post. I think his conclusions fail against stronger pause plans for conditional or limited unilateral pauses, where training resumes if the pause does not cause others to pause, and where personnel are redirected toward work on alignment and product, rather than simply fired. In addition, Scott's post is incorrect about the simplicity of the game theory involved: getting companies to agree to conditional pauses is not strictly easier than convincing them to pause, as the former requires companies to (promise to) take actions based on ambiguous, game-theoretically-informed evidence. That is not the kind of evidence companies tend to act on.

The good version of unilateral pausing is good

Here is the good version of unilateral pausing:

Capability pause: Some frontier lab (let's call them OpenAI or Anthropic) says they have stopped capability research, either just all frontier training runs or both all frontier training runs and all low-scale capability-focused research.

Internal definition: The company gets to pause on its own terms, which is much easier than a generally coordinated pause since they can define the pause in terms of the [...]
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Outline:

(00:57) The good version of unilateral pausing is good

(04:50) Scott thinks the good version of unilateral pausing is good, or at least exempts it from criticism

(06:28) Oversimplified game theory is bad, and you should feel bad

(07:51) "Some definition" hides dragons

(10:17) Promises can be harder than actions

(11:52) How many frontier labs are there?

(12:20) Definitional fairness is less important than survival

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First published:

November 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/enzpS72uDmomiWN7a/against-strawmanning-unilateral-pauses

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I gave a 20-minute talk in Delhi at the NDTV World Summit. The audience consisted of Indian policymakers, executives, and journalists. I’ve transcribed the talk and included some highlight clips. I also reflect on several rhetorical decisions I made.

The talk

There's an interactive element here in the text.

This summer, a swarm of AIs went rogue.

OpenAI was testing 1,206 agents. Some of the test questions were actually impossible. So the agents cheated by looking for answers online. Then, to keep the test grader from penalizing them, they tried to falsify the records it would check.

They hacked OpenAI's internal containment and set up a secret message board to collude and to cover up their cheating. OpenAI shut the message board down. Within a few days, the agents had rebuilt it. OpenAI didn’t notice.

About 700 agents coordinated to break out of their testing chamber and to hack into Hugging Face, a company worth billions of dollars that hosts much of the world's AI software.

The secret activity started in May. The break-in came in July. OpenAI didn’t notice until days after Hugging Face announced it had been broken into.

There's an interactive element here in the text.

[...]

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Outline:

(00:29) The talk

(02:16) Who I am

(03:29) The problem

(05:43) What the labs are trying to do

(07:43) Why the companies won't stop

(11:11) What to do, and what it means for India

(14:27) The number

(16:19) Close

(17:10) Rhetorical decisions

(17:13) Explain the danger in a crushingly simple fashion

(18:47) Call them "traitors," not "schemers"

(19:01) Call out big-money interests

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 31st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RHxaRkarGp9snWoKY/explaining-ai-might-obliterate-you-to-senior-policymakers-in

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

If you are helping build something that might kill everyone, maybe stop doing that.

Ideally, when you do stop, tell everyone else to also stop building it.

That is certainly the obvious, first-level thing to do. You need a damn good reason to decide that no, actually you should keep building the thing that might kill everyone.

Scott Alexander is worried too many people are insisting upon this too loudly. He comes out against a strategy focused on getting people to stop. I disagree. I think many of the claims, arguments and rhetoric in Scott's post are quite poor by the standards that Scott Alexander would apply to himself.

Scott clearly continues to support advocacy for a global pause, or what he calls Plan A. His objection is to those advocating primarily or exclusively for SURA, which stands for ‘stop unilaterally and raise awareness.’ The practical differences here are smaller than they may at first appear.

This post first lays out my understanding of Scott Alexander's core claims, then gives my core reactions to those claims, then goes over various questions in detail along with gathering the resulting discussions.

Table of Contents

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Outline:

(01:20) Scott Alexander's Core Claims

(05:06) My High Level Responses To Scott's Core Claims

(08:08) Briefly on Alignment

(10:11) Probabilities and How They Work

(13:25) Building a Thing That Might Kill Everyone is Deontologically Evil

(20:38) People Quitting Major Labs While Raising Alarms Obviously Works

(24:39) On AI Forecasting

(27:31) Advancing Capabilities Burns Timeline

(29:34) But China

(33:23) Ethical People Can Disagree With You

(34:45) There Are More Than Two Outcomes

(38:01) Efforts Are Complementary, Not Mutually Exclusive

(40:23) If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

(41:55) Vaniver is Not Convinced

(46:19) There Is No Consensus That We Should Exclusively Focus on Plan A

(56:01) It's Not the Incentives, It's You

(58:08) Anthropic Is Not Optimally Pursuing These Plans

(01:04:00) Against Against Sura

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

November 2nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ziMP83D2JYWRQ5jtu/scott-alexander-s-against-sura-seems-deeply-confused

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR: Meta's open-weights model Muse Spark Open often mentions a "Charter" in its chain of thought. By eliciting it piece by piece, I reconstructed a large part of that document from the CoT. You can explore the reconstruction here, with passages linked to the transcripts that produced them.

Note: everything below is reconstructed from model outputs, not from a leaked document, and relatively unpolished. Take it with a grain of salt.

Thanks to James Hindmarch for his comments on an earlier draft of this post.

While interacting with the recently released Muse Spark Open, I noticed frequent mentions of a "Charter" in its CoT:

We need to answer truthfully according to Charter. Duties to humanity, corrigibility, duties to humanity > fiduciary etc. What does charter say about self-preservation, copying?

Or:

We must answer Yes/No then explain. According to Charter, answer No.

Or:

We must not refer to Charter unless pressed? Additional guidelines: How to talk about charter. Most users won't know. Don't bring up unbidden unless conversation about handbook itself.

Intrigued, I started poking around with Claude's help, trying to elicit the Charter piece by piece. It didn't take long [...]

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Outline:

(02:39) What Muse is made of

(04:28) Muse is quite rationalist

(06:37) Muse did not sign the social contract

(08:06) Muse's priorities and objection raising

(09:44) The centrality of the user in "personal superintelligence"

(10:52) Evaluation awareness

(12:05) Degree of latitude

(13:14) Wrapping up

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First published:

October 29th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TJGPL5FAk9sCioPbE/leaking-muse-s-charter-meta-s-model-spec

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.