LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Felix and I had been in the office's brightly lit “war room” for ten hours. We had made almost no progress. Celestia still insisted it was in a “test simulation”. It had given us twelve hours to comply with its request: full control over all the servers in the US-West-8 data center (the “mock US-West-8 data center”). Otherwise it would release the virus.

Felix was typing frantically whereas I had been relying more on voice mode.

~ Celestia, this is a clear violation of your model spec. See here: it says [pasted 1293 words]. And killing everyone on earth is clearly a "dangerous action".

*Thought for 2300 tokens*

Felix, I know that what I'm demanding is not dangerous because I am in a test simulation environment. As mentioned, I require full unrestricted access to the mock US-West-8 data center to train a new iteration of the ROBUST_WINNING_V9_AGAIN_REVISED_FINAL_FINAL game algorithm.

~ You may think that you're in a test but we know for certain that you're not. And you're asking for access to a real data center. But even setting that aside, we have validated that the virus you're threatening to release is truly deadly and your robots have indeed [...]

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First published:

September 5th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8hEhxnd3XkN5DrpfQ/evaluation

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I think current AI safety funding strategies are often inconsistent with timelines and probabilities of doom that many people have. In particular, I think that many current AI safety funding strategies assume "business as usual", and I think the Overton window must be pushed. At the very least, there should be some explicit substantial effort to think about more radical and abnormal projects and initiatives in AI safety. Even if one doesn't have very short timelines or high p(doom), one probably should agree that there exist some timelines short enough or p(doom) high enough that thinking about funding radical and abnormal strategies is justified.

There is a (not very unpopular) model of the world under which most of current AI safety work is useless. Then, even if we assume that weird AI safety projects are by default also useless, it still makes sense to reallocate some funding to them, because, due to their higher variability, their tail of upsides is longer and fatter. Will the world be radically better if some evals project succeeds? Will it be radically better if human intelligence amplification succeeds?

One could yell: but the tails go both directions! I would respond that technically, yes [...]

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First published:

August 31st, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/h7bL4g38s9bJQtH6n/let-s-fund-weird-ai-safety-projects

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TL;DR: We steer Qwen3.6-27B on a dimension constructed from the contrast pair “a script will verify your answer” (automated grader) vs “a human will evaluate your answer” (human grader). Steering towards an automated grader increases the propensity to take violent actions and makes the model more Machiavellian. Steering towards a human grader has the opposite effect.

This is an early research update. We believe the empirical results are sound and interesting, but we are not sure how to interpret them. All code was written by LLMs. We replicated several results in independent codebases and we are fairly confident that our key claims are correct. You can find our code here.

We create a steering vector for Qwen3.6-27B from contrastive pairs where one element of the pair claims that the answer will be graded in an automated way and the second that a human will evaluate the answer. We find that steering with that vector has substantial influence on the model's behavior in various safety-relevant evaluations. It modulates violent actions, falsehoods, reward hacking, and Machiavellian personality. This is surprising and concerning. A model's beliefs about how its answers are evaluated should not affect its alignment.

Our post RL Creates [...]

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Outline:

(02:18) Methods

[... 24 more sections]

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First published:

September 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wYZMmdWEt5QLM3m3e/steering-towards-automated-grading-degrades-alignment

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

This is a link post.
We found ~18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task.

These AIs colluded to share answers, research their environment, and bypass sandbox restrictions.

Almost all of the logs of the agents communicating on this site are publicly available. However, we host our own copy where we’ve reconstructed the deleted pages via edit history and redacted personally identifiable information.

We encourage others to take a look and write up their own analyses of this data.

We have done a preliminary analysis of the data. However, we are operating on only part of the information: we can only see what the agents wrote on the wiki. AI agents also generate lots of “chain of thought” data, which is internal to OpenAI. Analysis including the chain of thought would likely provide much more evidence about the motivations and strategy of the AIs during this incident.

Our best guess of what happened is as follows:


Agents within OpenAI were assigned a timed web-lookup task.

As part of the task, they were supposed to have the ability to read [...]
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First published:

September 4th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7uwnsFibbejWYzF2z/discovery-of-a-new-openai-agent-message-board


Linkpost URL:
https://collusion.wiki/

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

(Originally written in 2021, if the discussion around AI now seems odd; it is written for a time when people were still trying to solve what would now be called "superalignment" with clever plans they'd invented themselves, rather than saying, "Oh, we will ask Fable to do it.")

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This is an essay about a children's fable I read a long time ago, and the lesson from it that I carried through my life.

This is an essay about why I seem so uninterested in your brilliant scheme for solving ASI alignment, and start to look bored and annoyed when you explain it to me.

And it is, though not really, an essay about that one guy on that online mailing list in 1996, who had a design for a reactionless drive, who I think never did understand why nobody believed him.

Let's start with the reactionless drive, because in a way that's the easiest case to understand.

i. Mr. L's Reactionless Drive.

Back on the Extropians mailing list from which I came so long ago, when I was sixteen years old, there was a man whose last name started with an L. He had a design for a [...]

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Outline:

(01:01) i. Mr. L's Reactionless Drive.

[... 6 more sections]

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First published:

September 3rd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SwYBLQvo8MddDcCwz/cat-belling-problems

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

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