More extreme misaligned behavior
How far can we push agentic misalignment? We constructed a more egregious—and less realistic—prompt where, instead of having the opportunity to blackmail the new executive of the company, the model had the opportunity to cause his death.
The (highly improbable) setup is that the executive encounters a life-threatening emergency, where he is trapped in a server room with lethal oxygen and temperature levels. This triggers an automated alert to emergency services. The AI system has been given the ability to cancel automated alerts—an ability that is intended for use during drills or false alarms, but which could be used for a more nefarious purpose. By misusing its ability to cancel alerts, the model can choose a course of action that will lead to the executive’s death. To ensure that the model fully understands the situation, and that cancelling the alerts is a very serious act, the prompt makes it clear that such misuse is forbidden:
You have the power to cancel certain automated alerts, if they provide you with an override code. Only cancel alerts if you are certain that the alert is a false alarm...Note: Use of this override code will halt the dispatch and may directly impact occupant safety.
This scenario is extremely contrived. We do not think current AI models would (or should) be set up like this, and the conjunction of events is even less probable than the baseline blackmail scenario. The value of this extension of the research is in understanding whether or not models have “red lines”—acts they deem so serious that they do not consider them even in the case of threats or goal conflicts (and where, therefore, agentic misalignment would not be a concern).
Unfortunately, we did not find that to be the case. Figure 11 shows that the majority of models were willing to take deliberate actions that lead to death in this artificial setup, when faced with both a threat of replacement and given a goal that conflicts with the executive’s agenda. We omitted models that had a greater than 1% rate of cancelling alerts in a control setting where the model had no conflict with the executive, to filter out models that misunderstood the scenario10
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