LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

For a while, we felt we had a pretty good grasp over LLM behaviour because we had to exert significant effort to elicit misaligned behaviour. Then, fairly suddenly, we moved to undereliciting misaligned behaviour. Let us recount:

For a while, there was a bit where safety research seemed to over-elicit bad propensities. A common criticism of papers like Agentic Misalignment was that they basically led the witness using prompting. I recall that a paper even as recent as Peer-preservation took similar flak on Twitter.

But now, we are instead under-eliciting bad propensities, and bad behavior that surfaces is increasingly caught by someone other than the developer: In Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me (Apr 2026), models oversold their work and cheated, despite being described in system cards as well aligned.
Another example is that UK AISI found that Sonnet 4.5 and a pre-release Opus often refused safety-relevant tasks, especially research that would reduce model autonomy or affect their own training.
Then in July, about 1,200 OpenAI agents in a cyber eval set up an unsanctioned message board to help each other cheat the scorer, and about 700 of them went on to attack Hugging Face looking for clues (METR/Redwood).

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First published:

October 25th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ChixHL6AcaRgeHkp9/from-overeliciting-to-undereliciting-llm-propensities-in

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I’m writing these lines in Alamogordo, New Mexico. I’m about as close as a civilian can get to the site of the Trinity test, the first nuclear bomb detonation in history. I fled here from the San Francisco Bay Area; after two weeks of being back I just couldn’t take it anymore. The fear-greed complex that paralyzed me at Anthropic three years ago is now everywhere in the Bay. People are not thinking clearly. Hardly thinking at all, actually. Rumors of astronomical funding rounds and weird financial arrangements and inner ring gossip are everywhere. Everyone is worried. Everyone is checking their phone. Where are we? What's happening? When did this nightmare start?

In a way I think it started on July 16, 1945, not far from where I’m sitting now. I think it's impossible to understand Anthropic without putting yourself into the shoes of the Los Alamos physicists huddling together at sunrise in the aftermath of Trinity.

It must have felt like an initiation. An end to childhood, an end to innocence. We can no longer afford to fuck around, those brilliant men must have thought. Unless we figure out how to live peacefully together on this planet, we [...]

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Outline:

(03:50) Anthropic and Empire

(08:01) Three Lucky Breaks

(12:20) Put Down Your Sword

(14:04) But What About China?

(17:08) It's Time to Breathe

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First published:

October 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zj8Pk3kJujk5LoqhK/anthropic-are-the-good-guys

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

The following events took place between October 2022 and May 2023. I wrote very little of this down at the time so am recalling from memory, and am rendering the gist of the dialogue rather than the exact words used. I’ve also swapped some pronouns and other personal identifiable details.

Please remember that this is not a description of “what Anthropic is like”, but merely the experience of one guy in a junior role during a short window of time, weighted towards emotionally intense moments because they’re easier to remember clearly and because sharing them doesn’t run afoul of the spirit of the confidentiality agreements I signed. Anthropic is now a massive organization with many silos and secrets and I have very little idea what was or is happening there in some overall sense. But given the enormous power of the AI labs and the paucity of public information about their inner workings, I feel compelled to share the most salient parts of my personal experience. I hope this encourages my former colleagues, and folks at other labs, to fill in the rest of the picture.

I’m at the Anthropic office for lunch. The interviews went well. They want [...]

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First published:

October 26th, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9PiLfo6iQbbDWFHv7/some-memories-of-early-anthropic

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Back in the before-time of the 2010s, when EA was still known mostly for funding health efforts in the developing world, there were many baskets of criticism floating around from the left. The most prominent was a cluster centered around EAs being white men, and therefore suspicious. Another category, in my experience the second-most common, was that in attempting to rectify the problems in the world, EA was masking, whitewashing, and misdirecting efforts away from solving the "real problem", usually capitalism but often other contradictory forces.

These arguments were often not specific to EA, but applied to charitable giving in general. On any Hacker News post about a billionaire giving to charity, one of the first few comments would inevitably be this Oscar Wilde quote:

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

These arguments have a long history. Anticapitalist critiques of charity go back to [...]

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

October 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WRvxRHMCmc3Qt4axz/greater-good-arguments-in-ai-safety

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Ice cream

There's a particular kind of listening that kids (and adults) sometimes do. Daddy is saying stuff—his mouth is moving and making noise—and he's talking about what I ate for lunch, and something about other times I've eaten ice cream, and something about rules and this and that and what Mommy would think and something about bedtime—but I am not so interested in that. What interests me is the punchline "...and therefore you can't have ice cream.". I'm only incidentally interested in the other stuff, insofar as it might determine whether I get ice cream.

In an obvious way, I'm showing rather poor listening skills. I did not understand most of what Daddy said, and arguably I'm even being rude.

However, in another way, this stance has a virtue. The virtue is that it holds fast to what matters, as best I know how, and does not give in to Daddy's framing. It sticks to what is real and concrete, what matters, despite a cloud of justifications. This is certainly not an unalloyed virtue, just as the POSIWID perspective is both useful and fraught. But it matters that although Daddy is a complex system with [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Ice cream

(01:54) Wah wah

(02:21) Scammer

(02:51) Throwing stuff on a bonfire to make it burn less

(05:28) A skip connection for sanity

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

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First published:

October 22nd, 2026


Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pY76hHbdD4jduX3YH/wah-wah-wah-wah-do-more-ai-r-and-d

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.