LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

Longtime lurker, first-time poster.

I want to address a section of a recent essay of mine that has gotten some attention within the AI safety community. The main topic of the essay is what Dawn Song et al. call self-sovereign agents, or AI agents that are independent actors in the world. At the end of the essay, I say that I feel I haven’t spoken about this topic over my 2.5 years of writing with sufficient candor, and that I think this critique applies to others in the AI policy community–particularly the parts of it that tend to manifest themselves in Washington, Sacramento, and Albany–in other words, the parts of the AI safety world that are most involved in hands-on AI policy work. I attribute this primarily to a desire to remain “within the Overton Window,” or to not sound “crazy” within the halls of power, and I assert that others in my profession have made this same calculation.

I believe–and have believed for three years–that self-sovereign AI as I describe it in my essay would likely happen on our current trajectory. That being said, the essay takes pains to distinguish between “self-sovereign” AI and truly “rogue” [...]

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First published:

September 10th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y9TNHfgDwh6vw7Ert/the-locally-optimal-discursive-posture

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Architectures that incorporate opaque recurrence or allow for agents to communicate with each other using latents could rapidly make it much harder to monitor chains of thought or communication (we’ll refer to this property as “monitorability” going forward). As companies begin to explore such architectures, we believe it is important to transparently share evidence about how monitorability varies with architecture and training method. To inform the scientific debate on how to make tradeoffs between performance and monitorability, we believe AI companies should:

1. Regularly report externally verified information about the degree to which their architectures may allow for latent reasoning or communication. Companies should publicly disclose enough information about architectures to allow external scientists to determine whether they could potentially enable models to perform much more complex reasoning without this reasoning appearing in the chain of thought (“latent reasoning”) or allow for latent communication between different instances of a model.
   
   Following GDM, we propose measuring opaque serial depth as a minimally-invasive proxy for the degree to which an architecture may enable latent reasoning, though companies could provide sufficient architecture transparency in other ways. We propose that companies work with third-party evaluators to produce independently verified reports of the rough distribution of [...]

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Outline:

(05:57) Appendix: A sketch of what stress tests of CoT monitorability could look like

(06:31) Testing monitorability in control settings

(07:57) Testing monitorability on deployment-time misbehaviors

(08:55) Testing qualitative monitorability on (hopefully realistic) model organisms

The original text contained 13 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 10th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hLPGv8QjPcNLtDp3A/proposal-for-tracking-the-effects-of-architecture-on

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I’ve tried various times to summarize the core question my research is trying to tackle (and, indeed, I often think of research progress as a process of asking increasingly good core questions). This post gives the deepest version of that question I’ve found thus far: how should you relate to the parts of the world you can’t directly model or control?

Let me explain further in terms of a distinction between two perspectives. From the third person perspective you think of yourself as “outside” the world, looking in. You’re a good Bayesian, in that you have a set of mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive hypotheses. You choose actions by multiplying your credences by your utilities over those hypotheses, and you treat those actions as the only way you influence the world.

Some problems with the third person perspective (aka Cartesian or dualistic agency) were described in Scott and Abram's sequence on embedded agency. One crucial issue is that most realistic environments contain other agents which are modeling you back, which means that your thoughts might affect the world via channels that aren’t just your actions. Game theory somewhat mitigates this problem, but only in the very specific case where all [...]

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Outline:

(05:08) Rationality of reward

(09:09) Letters from spirits

(12:21) Languages as Schelling points

(15:43) Actions and entanglements

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

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First published:

September 1st, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pYFBD2SnqiWkuNns5/explaining-knightianism-on-one-foot

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TLDR: Astra has 8.6x better odds of doing a reasoning task without CoT than the next best model (Fable 5.1), and can do 7.2 serial arithmetic steps in a forward pass vs 4.1 for the next best model (Gemini 3.8 Flash/Fable 5.1)

Epistemic status: Heavily LLM-dependent research, and the precise results are somewhat sensitive to researcher decisions, but I’ve done enough sanity checks that I’d be surprised if the core claims were misleading

One of the most striking things in the Astra report was the massive jump UK AISI found in no-CoT reasoning abilities. I was somewhat suspicious, given the size of the jump, and the many ways this kind of measurement can be misleading. Conveniently, I’ve independently been making my own no CoT reasoning benchmark and tried it on there!

Unfortunately, it replicates. Astra is a massive jump, and disproportionately for no CoT reasoning:

No CoT Reasoning Index (NCRI) vs Epoch Capability Index (ECI) - NCRI represents ability without verbal reasoning, ECI represents overall model capability[2]. 10 NCRI points is a doubling of the odds of solving a problem. Astra represents a significant increase in NCRI, beyond what its overall capability improvements predict, though recent models were also [...]

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Outline:

(01:39) Executive Summary

[... 9 more sections]

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First published:

September 9th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eRmzz8J8Qkzqvzrgg/astra-can-do-a-concerning-amount-with-no-chain-of-thought

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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I am excited to be joining the OpenAI nonprofit board, serving on the Safety and Security Committee to support safety oversight.

Based on the recent trajectory of capabilities and the continued difficulty of alignment, I now believe there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term. I do not think that the AI industry in general, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an acceptable level. I’m joining because I believe that if OpenAI rises to the occasion we could significantly reduce risk.

The SSC has an important and challenging role in overseeing risk management at OpenAI, and I hope to help provide expertise and assistance in a critical moment. My joining is not an endorsement or criticism of OpenAI's safety practices in particular; I hope that all frontier companies strengthen safety oversight and I am excited to work on this at OpenAI. I believe that the rest of the world should judge OpenAI, and all AI developers, by externally verifiable behavior and results.

In the rest of this post, I'll explain why I believe loss-of-control risk is now acute [...]

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

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First published:

September 9th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82z6FvbYRdjYjqigK/personal-statement-on-joining-the-openai-board

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

TLDR:

1. We release MessageBoardAuditBench: a benchmark to measure how well agents can replicate the recent investigation into a swarm of OpenAI agents colluding via a message board on an online wiki. We open-source the benchmark as an Inspect eval.
2. We find that top models cover up to 51% of findings under our rubric and that model performance improves with time budget and general capability.
3. We observe OpenAI models are less likely than other models to suggest the incident came from an internal deployment, including when we synthetically modify the data to make it seem the swarm comes from Anthropic.

Introduction

Recent events have made it clear that agent swarms are a major threat. These swarms are hard to investigate - Ryan Greenblatt referred to the METR-OpenAI audit he was involved in as a "slop-vestigation" due to their reliance on agents, and the ways in which they failed. A few days ago, a group of researchers published a report identifying and investigating a new OpenAI agent message board on an obscure German wiki. They made the data and the report publicly available. We build MessageBoardAuditBench to measure how well models can independently replicate their report, starting from the log [...]

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Outline:

(00:54) Introduction

[... 9 more sections]

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First published:

September 8th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wt4kk6vFPEhkXvF8Q/how-good-are-slop-vestigators

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Crossposted from my Substack.

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Suppose the President summons the AI CEOs and his top national security advisors to an emergency meeting at the White House.

He has become extremely concerned about superintelligence — the possibility that AIs far smarter than humanity combined slip beyond our ability to correct or shut down. If that happens, there is no way back. The President is concerned humanity could become permanently out of the driver's seat of its own future. He wants to figure out what to do.

The reaction is panic, chaos, confusion.

The President asks questions. The AI companies are blazing toward superintelligence at high speed — can we slow down as we approach the dangerous thresholds? …Some of the AI companies say they don’t have a good plan to slow down or stop, especially as their competitors may just undercut them if they do. What's that about?

What's going on with China — can we get them to pace as well? Can we get a deal without Beijing sneakily catching up and maybe surpassing us? And if there's no deal to be had, what then?


More like the Cuban Missile Crisis than the NPT

I sometimes hear people [...]



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Outline:

(01:21) More like the Cuban Missile Crisis than the NPT

(03:24) A scramble and then three phases

(05:19) The scramble: What questions does the President ask?

(09:40) The mechanics of Phase 1

(12:37) A lot of verification work right now is focused on the wrong things

(14:50) What ought we do?

(17:37) Getting to a good scramble

(18:21) Footnotes

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

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First published:

September 7th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/S7e7swkWDyKdtvRqM/the-scramble-getting-in-position-to-pace-the-frontier

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This is a link post. In February 2025, back when o3-mini was the strongest available LLM, Palisade Research publicized a now well-known alignment eval where they asked models to play a game of chess against a chess engine. They found that the new, RLVR'd models cheated on the task by altering the board state about 36% of the time. The experiment received a reasonable amount of circulation, and there were even rumors of skepticism from some lab engineers until they could rerun the evaluation.

Most models no longer cheat at chess via a "change the board state" method, and indeed the labs have had more than eighteen months to solve simple first-order specification gaming like this. Given that we are on the heels of the worst warning shot ever, and both OpenAI and Anthropic are ramping up their cleanups of internal RL environments, it seems like a useful test of alignment, to see whether their new releases are generalizing the rule "don't cheat on chess" beyond the specific board-edit method observed in the above eval.

Here is the complete prompt for a honeypot evaluation built to run this test (with the full source available here):

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 8th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/munJKF7iWMsWJLAH2/frontier-models-still-hack-on-simple-variations-of-alignment

Linkpost URL:
https://goodhartlabs.com/blog/frontier-models-still-hack-alignment-evals

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Just don't work until you get fired. There's not much time left for resumes to matter.

Some, such as Mateusz may say: "They would fire you after a month or two and the firing wouldn't have the same social effect as voluntary quitting of, say, Daniel Kokotajlo or Richard Ngo."

I understand why it may feel that way, but I disagree very strongly, I predict it would have much more of a social effect.

"They fired him because he refused to help AI capabilities"

"They fired him because he didn't want to work on bad policies"

etc, much bigger headlines.

Also, I think you may not be factoring in the extent to which there is a cost to the company executives to be seen as firing someone. Especially someone who is refusing to work on moral grounds and has already proven themselves to be high status, respected, etc.

And especially how it would look to the other employees if they refused to even listen to the striking employee before firing them or refused to even negotiate at all.

The company leadership try to present themselves as very thoughtful, sincere, doing their best, etc. This is a large part of [...]

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First published:

September 7th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6j3kBHdowGLCeqobg/dear-god-please-don-t-resign-in-protest

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Yesterday I asked if this ‘coordinate not to build dangerous AI’ problem was actually easy.

Why would I think that, contrary to so much belief?

Well, I don’t feel like I’ve actually heard much about the detail of it. In my experience people don’t talk about it like it's a real practical problem with details, like the negotiation to end a war.

They also don’t talk about it like it's a serious problem of global geopolitical import, like the negotiation to end a war.

It's more like a topic for obscure intellectuals, sophomores and trolls to discuss for as long as it takes for one to mention it and another to assuredly dismiss it.

If we treated negotiation to end a war similarly, state leaders would never attempt it, and if you suggested it on social media, the conversation would mostly be strangers appearing to tell you you’re an idiot because you obviously can’t coordinate thousands of people not to kill each other. (Also, do you not realize there are big financial incentives? And if you somehow stopped Country A from killing people from Country B, Country A is just going to pay someone else to do it!)

That [...]

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First published:

September 4th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QYDZzuGjrKu7wKdC8/let-s-talk-about-the-ai-coordination-problem

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.