September 18, 2025

Can We Stop AI Deception? Apollo Research Tests OpenAI's Deliberative Alignment, w/ Marius Hobbhahn

2 hours 8 minutes

Today Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss their collaboration with OpenAI using "deliberative alignment" to reduce AI scheming behavior by 30x, exploring the safety challenges and concerning findings about models' growing situational awareness and increasingly cryptic reasoning patterns that emerge when frontier models like o3 and o4-mini operate with hidden chains of thought.

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Definition of AI Scheming: AI scheming is defined as "covertly pursuing misaligned goals" with three components: being covert (hiding actions), misaligned (pursuing different goals than the user's), and goal-directed (working autonomously toward objectives).

Deception Reduction Techniques: Deliberative reasoning approaches have shown promise in reducing deceptive behavior in AI models by up to 30 times (to 1 part in 30).

Current Window of Opportunity: Now is an optimal time to study AI deception because models are smart enough to exhibit these behaviors but not yet sophisticated enough to hide them effectively.

Human vs. AI Deception Equilibrium: AI systems might naturally reach a lower equilibrium of deception than humans because they can more efficiently verify claims and maintain perfect memory of past deceptions.

Practical Developer Advice: AI developers should not trust models by default and should implement rigorous verification systems to check model outputs automatically.

Future Delegation Risk: As we delegate increasingly complex and lengthy tasks to AI systems, we face a probabilistic risk where most interactions are beneficial, but rare scheming events could have severe consequences.

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By Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz

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