TL;DR: If you are thinking of using interpretability to help with strategic deception, then there's likely a problem you need to solve first: how are intentional descriptions (like deception) related to algorithmic ones (like understanding the mechanisms models use)? We discuss this problem and try to outline some constructive directions.

1. Introduction

A commonly discussed AI risk scenario is strategic deception: systems that execute sophisticated planning against their creators to achieve undesired ends. In particular, this is insidious because a system that is capable of strategic planning and also situationally aware might be able to systematically behave differently when under observation, and thus evaluation methods that are purely behavioral could become unreliable. One widely hypothesized potential solution to this is to use interpretability, understanding the internals of the model, to detect such strategic deception. We aim to examine this program and a series of problems that appear on its way. We are primarily concerned with the following:

Strategic deception is an intentional description or an intentional state. By intentional state, we mean that it involves taking the intentional stance towards a system and attributing mental properties, like beliefs and desires, to it; for example, believing that it is raining is an intentional state, while being wet is not.^[1] In contrast to this, current interpretability has focused on the algorithmic description of behaviors. The safety-relevant properties to detect would largely appear as strategic intentional states about potentially deceptive actions.^[2]We argue that intentional states are an importantly different level of description from algorithmic states, and it is not clear how to describe the former in terms of the latter. We think that studying the connection between algorithmic description and intentional states has been underexplored, but it is likely an important prerequisite to building a deception detector.
The different possible relationships between the levels of intentional and algorithmic states. A particularly convenient one is a “simple correspondence”, where one algorithmic variable corresponds directly to an intentional state. We outline some alternative possibilities, which may make the job of designing a decept

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