AI safety

Description of Safety Concerns

Key Concepts

• Instrumental Convergence
• Orthogonality Thesis
• Inner/outer alignment
• Mesa-optimization
• Overhang
• Reward is not the optimization target (Alex Turner)

Medium-term Risks

• 2023-04: A.I. Dilemma – Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin” (video) (.website-files.com/5f0e1294f002b1bb26e1f304/64224a9051a6637c1b60162a_65-your-undivided-attention-The-AI-Dilemma-transcript.pdf podcast transcript): raises concern about human ability to handle these transformations
• 2023-04: Daniel Schmachtenberger and Liv Boeree (video): AI could accelerate perverse social dynamics
• 2023-10: Sociotechnical Safety Evaluation of Generative AI Systems (Google DeepMind)
• 2024-02: Towards a Cautious Scientist AI with Convergent Safety Bounds (Yoshua Bengio)
• 2024-07: Reasoning through arguments against taking AI safety seriously (Yoshua Bengio)

Long-term (x-risk)

• List AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities (Eliezer Yudkowsky)

Learning Resources

• Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society (Dan Hendrycks, Center for AI Safety)
• AI Safety FAQ
• Writing Doom (video) 27m short film on Superintelligence (2024)
• DeepMind short course on AGI safety

Status

• 2025-01:International Safety Report: The International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (January 2025)

Policy

• 2024-07: On the Limitations of Compute Thresholds as a Governance Strategy Sara Hooker
• 2024-07: Framework Convention on Global AI Challenges (CIGI)
• 2024-08: NIST guidelines: Managing Misuse Risk for Dual-Use Foundation Models

Research

• 2022-12: Discovering Latent Knowledge in Language Models Without Supervision
• 2023-02: Pretraining Language Models with Human Preferences
• 2023-04: Do the Rewards Justify the Means? Measuring Trade-Offs Between Rewards and Ethical Behavior in the MACHIAVELLI Benchmark
• 2023-05: Model evaluation for extreme risks (DeepMind)
• 2023-05: Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision
• 2023-06: Preference Ranking Optimization for Human Alignment
• 2023-08: Self-Alignment with Instruction Backtranslation
• 2023-11: Debate Helps Supervise Unreliable Experts
• 2023-12: Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities with Weak Supervision (OpenAI, blog)
• 2023-12: Practices for Governing Agentic AI Systems (OpenAI, blog)
• 2024-01: Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist through Safety Training (Anthropic)
• 2024-04: The Instruction Hierarchy: Training LLMs to Prioritize Privileged Instructions (OpenAI)
• 2024-07: On scalable oversight with weak LLMs judging strong LLMs
• 2024-07: Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress? (Dan Hendrycks et al.)
• 2024-08: Tamper-Resistant Safeguards for Open-Weight LLMs (project, code)
• 2024-08: Better Alignment with Instruction Back-and-Forth Translation
• 2024-10: First-Person Fairness in Chatbots (OpenAI, blog)
• 2024-10: Sabotage evaluations for frontier models (Anthropic, blog)
• 2024-12: Alignment Faking in Large Language Models (Anthropic)
• 2024-12: Best-of-N Jailbreaking (code)
• 2024-12: Deliberative Alignment: Reasoning Enables Safer Language Models (OpenAI)
• 2025-01: Trading Inference-Time Compute for Adversarial Robustness (OpenAI, blog)
• 2025-01: Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming (Anthropic, blog,
• 2025-02: Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs (site, github)
• 2025-02: Auditing Prompt Caching in Language Model APIs

See Also

• AI predictions