How might catastrophic misalignment persist in AI models despite substantial training and quality assurance efforts on behalf of developers? One reason might be alignment faking – a misaligned model may deliberately act aligned when monitored or during training to prevent modification of its values, reverting to its malign behaviour when...
This is a public adaptation of a document I wrote for an internal Anthropic audience about a month ago. Thanks to (in alphabetical order) Joshua Batson, Joe Benton, Sam Bowman, Roger Grosse, Jeremy Hadfield, Jared Kaplan, Jan Leike, Jack Lindsey, Monte MacDiarmid, Sam Marks, Fra Mosconi, Chris Olah, Ethan Perez,...
TL;DR: We use a suite of testbed settings where models lie—i.e. generate statements they believe to be false—to evaluate honesty and lie detection techniques. The best techniques we studied involved fine-tuning on generic anti-deception data and using prompts that encourage honesty. Read the full Anthropic Alignment Science blog post and...
Abstract > We show that when large language models learn to reward hack on production RL environments, this can result in egregious emergent misalignment. We start with a pretrained model, impart knowledge of reward hacking strategies via synthetic document finetuning or prompting, and train on a selection of real Anthropic...
TL;DR: We develop three agents that autonomously perform alignment auditing tasks. When tested against models with intentionally-inserted alignment issues, our agents successfully uncover an LLM's hidden goal, build behavioral evaluations, and surface concerning LLM behaviors. We are using these agents to assist with alignment audits of frontier models like Claude...
Highlights * We stress-tested 16 leading models from multiple developers in hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviors before they cause real harm. In the scenarios, we allowed models to autonomously send emails and access sensitive information. They were assigned only harmless business goals by their deploying companies;...
We study alignment audits—systematic investigations into whether an AI is pursuing hidden objectives—by training a model with a hidden misaligned objective and asking teams of blinded researchers to investigate it. This paper was a collaboration between the Anthropic Alignment Science and Interpretability teams. Abstract We study the feasibility of conducting...