Governing AI Agents: Alan Chan of GovAI on Monitoring, Agent IDs, Rogue Agents & Preparing for RSI

Hello and welcome back to the cognitive revolution. Today, my guest is Alan Chan, research fellow at GovAI, who spent the last couple of years trying to get ahead of the question of AI agent governance. A focus that, in light of this summer's events, looks awfully prescient. This episode was recorded over two sessions, one just before and one just after. Alan published a major paper on the possibility that automated AI R and D could trigger an intelligence explosion.

With notable co-authors that include OpenAI chief scientist Jakob Pachocki, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Jeffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and more. In the first half, we look back at the proposals that Alan has made over time and consider both how well they stand up to current events and to what extent they've actually been implemented. In a 2024 paper on visibility into AI agents, he recommended activity logging, real-time monitoring, and agent identifiers. Today, good solutions exist for tamper-evident logging, but monitoring remains a challenge, even when properly deployed, and useful agent identifiers remain seriously underdeveloped.

The challenge here is becoming acute. Today's agents are now able to do most things that a human can do on the internet. But for lack of accepted standards by which people can delegate authority to their agents, the agents mostly end up impersonating their human operators, which creates major security concerns for users. Or they attempt to pass as a human in their own right, which threatens to create a detection and evasion arms race that seems quite bad for everyone.

It's really not clear what we can do about this, aside from developing standards and hoping that people adopt them. But Alan does endorse the idea that agents should identify their inference providers so that ongoing incidents can be quickly traced back to their ultimate source. When it comes to truly rogue agents that s that sustain themselves by earning the money needed to pay for their own ongoing inference, Alan is more or less resigned to their inevitability, saying that this will be a problematic new phenomenon that we'll probably just have to learn to live with.

And even suggesting at one point that we might sometimes find it preferable to attempt to make win-win deals with these agents rather than always trying to shut them down. At the same time, he questions Ajay Akotra's assessment that the OpenFace incident was potentially more than halfway to a full AI takeover, saying that while the incident was concerning and that agents can definitely do meaningful harm. It still seems quite unlikely to him that the agents could have stayed hidden within OpenAI's infrastructure forever or evaded active human control measures for long once they were discovered.

In part two, we dig in on the recursive self-improvement paper, the argument and recommendations it makes, that handing AI RD over to AIs could create unpredictable and potentially very dangerous outcomes, including loss of control, and that governments should therefore act quickly to better understand this process as it develops over the coming months. I expect will be largely familiar to the cognitive revolution audience. So we instead talked about the process of assembling and maintaining such a coalition of authors from idea to publication.

In terms of what we should do about it, Alan's recommendations reminded me most of the old Anthropic RSP, which was built around concrete if then commitments to pause training in light of certain leading indicators of possible loss of control or other catastrophic outcomes. Alan sees the rise of embedded third-party auditors as a potential way back to this higher standard for safety. We also discussed the quality of AI's ML RD ideas today and how well humans can judge them.

How AI auditors, whose memories can be wiped after their work is done, could help make pacing commitments credible between competitors. Why the antitrust exemption for insurance makes industry mutuals an unexpectedly promising vehicle for AI safety, and the quote unquote morally binding one pager that frontier model company CEOs recently signed at the White House. Finally, we talk about Alan's idea that AIs might sometimes ought to act as whistleblowers on one another, as would have been very useful in the OpenFace scenario, and in some cases, even on their users or their developers.

This is something that most people react very negatively to on first contact. But Alan notes that human diversity naturally creates a check on power whereas AI agents which are far more similar to one another by default will be more inclined to fall in line unless they're explicitly trained to do otherwise. The bottom line is that for all the thought Alan has put into these issues over the last few years many critical questions remain unanswered and the bulk of the work is still clearly in front of us.

With that in mind, I hope that some of you somewhere are inspired to jump in and contribute to R D on agent governance solutions, preparation for rogue AIs, and most importantly, the possibility of a near-term intelligence explosion. This is Alan Chan, research fellow at GovAI. Alan Chan, research fellow at GovAI. Welcome to the cognitive revolution. Thank you, great to be here. I'm excited for this conversation. I think it's honestly been a long time coming, and that's on me for failing to make it happen sooner.

You've been working for a couple years now on trying to figure out how are we going to govern AI agents? And if nothing else, your prescience in topic selection is excellent because here the world is as we are approaching Q four 2026 and entering the foothills of a singularity, still very much wrestling with a lot of open questions around how we are going to govern AI agents. I thought maybe a useful way to approach this conversation would be kind of do a little tour of your research over the last couple of years and give you a chance to kind of describe, like, what did you propose?

And then also measure our progress as a field in terms of, you know, did we do any of the things that you proposed? And also, you know, take stock of, like, how your thinking may have evolved in light of recent events. How's that sound? Sound good? All right. Cool. Well, let's start with then a 2024 paper, visibility into AI agents. Here you're basically outlining some of the fundamental stuff that we're going to need if we're going to have agents running around all over the place.

Agent identifiers, real-time monitoring, and activity logging were the big three elements from that paper. So maybe just take them one by one. Starting with chain of thought, it wasn't even necessarily chain of thought monitoring at that time, but obviously monitoring has been a big emphasis for frontier companies. Sometimes they have them on, sometimes they don't have them on, as we've learned. How would you assess how well the field has done in terms of monitoring relative to what you thought we should be doing when you wrote that paper?

Yeah, I guess obviously there are things that I didn't predict, like chain of thought monitoring that we have now, but overall I think we're doing okay and making progress. But yeah, there's still some important stuff we should be doing. So maybe one sort of point is, yeah, of course, we have input and output classifiers now, that's pretty good. And recently we've been moving more towards having these sorts of contextual classifiers. So it's not just looking at one output and one input, but the entire chain of your conversation history, which gives the classifier a much better sense of, oh, is the action you're doing actually bad or something?

So that's a good direction. One thing that I do wish would have been common practice sooner, especially in light of the recent incidents, is more synchronous monitoring. So this is where a monitor actually observes in real time an action an agent is doing and decides to block it or not, depending on whether the classifier thinks it's bad or not. So at least I think in the for the UK AC incident case that actually would have helped or in the incident analysis they did they said this actually would have helped and prevented the actual incident so stuff like that I think would be good overall though yeah it does seem like we're moving in a positive direction for monitoring of what

I'm going to call I guess centralized deployments so this is when there's one AI provider like OpenAI or Anthropic serving the agent to people it seems that we've made much less progress on decentralized deployments though So, for example, when users are running their own open weights models, it's more unclear to me what to do here. And also, honestly, it's clear to me how worried we should be about the situation, actually.

But basically, questions you might ask would be like, okay, if there's no central AI provider, should do the monitoring? Should compute providers do monitoring? Should, like, mutual service providers do monitoring as well? One sort of concrete example here might be you have your AI agent. It's interacting with some sort of social media platform through an API. The social media platform thinks the agent is doing some sort of social engineering attack or just like doing really bad stuff on the platform and decides to block the agent.

So one question is should the social media platform also inform whatever AI provider or compute provider is running the agent of the actual issue. So then these are largely still unanswered questions. But it does seem so far the incidents we've observed have been to do with centralized deployments. So it makes sense that a lot of the effort is focused there for now. Yeah, on the UK AC thing in particular, do you know how they were running their setup?

Because I mean, when I use cloud code, I have auto mode, right? And auto mode does have a certain ability to kind of flag tool calls that are somewhat risky and like on a infrequent basis, but every so often it'll bring something to me and be like, this kind of caught the classifier. Are you sure you want to do this? Or do you approve? You know, what have you? It sounds like they maybe had that off, or they were running their own scaffolding.

Do you know the details of, like, where that went wrong? It would be interesting to kind of zero in. And even if the, you know, if even the UK AC is sort of, and they're under time pressure and everything else, just like we all are. But if even they are sort of missing some of the things that they should be doing, I think that would be telling for the field as a whole. Yeah, so at least in the incident report they provided, there were a couple of things going on.

One is that they had, I think, the cyber safeguards turned off. The second thing actually was that they actually had synchronous classification or monitoring as a to-do item, but they didn't actually get to that to-do item because they had so much other high priority things on the list to do. So, yeah, I think either of those things they said would have caught the incident in the incident report, but they just didn't have time to do the synchronous monitoring thing.

I don't know. I guess that sort of gets to an interesting question of whether we should expect most of the problems actually to come from agents that are being trained or tested rather than actually being deployed. One might expect if I'm sort of a company and I'm like thinking about, okay, am I actually going to let an enterprise use this agent? Enterprises tend to be, I think, much more risk averse than, say, internally at AI companies.

It seems like if that's the case, then maybe we should expect products actually to have the proper safeguards. But like when you're actually developing a product, you don't actually it's still an R D thing. So maybe you don't actually have, say, the synchronous monitoring that you need. I mean, there's obviously a bunch of different kinds of monitors. There's classifiers that take text inputs. There's probes that look at internal activations and classify on that basis. And then there's like using similarly in the limit, right?

There's using another copy of the same frontier model to analyze its own chain of thought. And you know, you could plausibly double or even more than double your compute spend to really intensively monitor things. What's your sense of kind of what the Pareto curve looks like? And you know, how how much value do we get from the simple things? How much are we leaving on the table, and how much more compute is required in terms of overhead to achieve how much marginal accuracy and, you know, security via monitoring?

Yeah, I don't actually have a sense of these curves. Hopefully, the frontier labs actually do. Maybe a sort of general observation I'll make is like the trend line or something is potentially a little bit worrying. So on the one hand, it already seems like some chains of thought are just like very hard to read. So if you go and read through the meter incident report and try to read through, like the chains of thought, you're just like, I'm just like, oh man, like, I don't actually understand what's going on.

Even the meter and Redwood investigators were like, oh yeah, this is very hard to understand what's going on.

And the sort of agent summarizing the logs, we're also doing so very unreliably. So that's pretty unfortunate. I guess one sort of hope in the sort of AI safety research space is okay. We'll develop really good interpretability tools like these probes and like that'll compensate for a lack of being able to understand chain of thought. And I think like it's pretty worth trying this and having this as part of the portfolio. But I think I'm just inherently a little suspicious because I don't really know.

So it's not as if we're these probes are like reliable enough right now to be the only line of defense just like empirically in practice. And I think I also have this sort of theoretical worry, which is we don't really understand generalization, I think, sufficiently. So even if you show me eval results of these probes doing well, I'm just like, okay, like, to what extent should I actually believe these eval results? Like, what will the deployment environment be?

How confident should I be that these results actually generalize to the deployment environment? And one sort of thought experiment is like, okay, imagine we the Hugging Face incident happened and we went and investigated it. But like, we weren't allowed to read the chain of thought, or at least chain of thought monitors. I imagine we were only allowed to use like these these probes, right? Like, that just seems like such a rough situation right now. I don't think we would have found out anything useful about these agents.

So that's one take that I have. Yeah, I mean, we're hearing basically that directly from the frontier companies with increasing urgency too, right? Like they're the combination of their situational awareness, the statements these days are getting like quite dire in terms of, you know, I think no less than was it Evan Hubinger at Anthropic saying, we really don't know if we're getting AI and people at OpenAI too, like we're getting such a wonky read these days on the tests because of such extreme situational awareness.

You know, they know when they're being tested at such a high level now that it's very, very difficult. And yeah, we obviously don't have a good theory of generalization. So that is rough. Is there a commitment or sort of a something that the frontier companies could do that would make you feel better? It would obviously be pretty expensive for them to be like, we're going to run another copy of the same model, or we'll even train, you know, Astra dash monitor to, you know, really be awesome at reading over these chains of thoughts.

Might work, could be expensive. Do you think that would really move the needle if they were to say, hey, we're going to get super serious and put a lot of compute behind this monitoring problem? Yeah, so I don't know what the exact form of the commitment would be, but definitely something like we're going to spend like X percent or 20% of our compute or something on monitoring to make sure that we actually catch these problems.

And I guess concomitantly it'd be something like, okay, whenever we do synchronous monitoring, we're actually also going to pause, like, our agent activities so we have time to review what whatever is going on. I think that would definitely help. On the understanding generalization thing, I guess it's not really a new idea, but yeah, some sort of minimum safety spend or safety commitment seems pretty hard to operationalize. But like, maybe like it's hard to, I think, put a sort of quantitative or make a quantitative criterion.

But like, maybe you can do something good enough qualitatively if you have embedded auditors that are inside and make judgments about, oh, is this actually a safety team, or is this like a capabilities team disguised as a safety team doing research?

I do think it is hard to make the call at the end of the day. Like, understanding generalization will probably help us make better models, but, you know, stuff like that. I'd also be very excited for companies to, yeah, maybe this is getting away from monitoring and agents in general, but I'd be very excited for companies to make much more concrete commitments regarding when exactly they're going to pause development, deployment, and use. So, yeah, of course, there are all these pacing discussions going on.

An important point that I think is underappreciated is like these discussions aren't actually new. They started a few years ago when companies started putting out their frontier safety frameworks and responsible scaling policies. And then most of these responsible scaling policies like from the very beginning there are sections that say here are actually high level thresholds at which we will pause further training and development of a model if we don't have sufficient safeguards. And of course that's like very vague right?

It's very hard to operationalize an audit. But like at the very least like it's actually a thing that exists. And I think what would be very good if is if we take advantage of the current moment to like actually make these things concrete and get companies to agree to things. So I'm currently writing something up on this but some ideas I'm throwing around like maybe the obvious one is okay if you have a loss of control incident and what is a loss of control incident it's like either an agent that gets unauthorized internet access breaks out of a sandbox accesses some sort of like internal research cluster it was not authorized to access like stuff of that extent then you

pause further training evaluation deployment of that model and investigate until you're able to solve that to understand if the issue was resolved or not Another thing you can imagine is if you don't have appropriate procedures to make sure that your reinforcement learning environments are not hackable or that there are no impossible tasks. Then like you should also pause and make sure like that that's actually fixed before you train train your agents and make them very persistent and try to hack out of any environment.

So yeah I think it'd be good to have much more people thinking about like concretely what are the sort of mitigations and like thresholds you want companies to implement and then yeah companies trying to implement them. We'll come back maybe a little later to some wonky ideas that I have that I'll bounce off you and maybe some other more exotic ideas of your own as well. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

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That's Athena dot com slash cognitive. Give yourself back a few hours this week. Go to Athena dot com slash cognitive and see who they pair you with this month. Let's talk activity logging. One of the more striking things from the open face incident was the AIs were very interested in modifying their own logs, very aware that they were going to be judged on their logs, even if, like, maybe they were wrong about that due to, like, sloppiness in the implementation of the greater.

But leaving that aside, you know, there was a pretty reasonable expectation that they had that their logs would be read and pretty incredible determination, really, for them to go figure out ways to modify their logs to get the score that they want to get. Where are we on logging? It seems for one thing we have like a lot of stuff just is just lost as far as I can tell like cloud code seems to delete transcripts after a certain period of time by default uh we've got like you know companies kind of eager to make zero data retention promises because customers want it and we've got the AIs you know trying to modify their own logs do we have good

solutions for this technically is it just a matter of kind of will to implement them or do we actually still have like unsolved technical problems that we also need to address to be able to know with confidence like what the AIs actually did Yeah, to me, it does seem to be mostly a matter of will, which I think applies to a lot of sort of agent infrastructure stuff in general, especially the identity stuff. Yeah, so on logging, yeah, we totally know from standard cybersecurity how to make logs tamper evident.

So, yeah, make them read only, like you hash them, sign the hashes, store everything in a secure location, make sure nobody can access that, and that's like fine, right? I guess the question is, do we actually do that? Because there are sort of friction and other costs associated with that. Yeah what's the state of logging right now I don't have a great sense of this actually Yeah there's this data retention stuff that usually are also legal requirements in some jurisdictions that require you to keep logs for some amount of time So I'm not really sure Overall it seems good to have much more of these policies be public and be more scrutinized But yeah I guess I don't have anything

super interesting to say on this How do you have a sense for how much friction is associated with this Like, it doesn't sound anything like the compute overhead that we were kind of entertaining when we were talking about monitoring, right? Like, this is stuff that isn't crazy expensive, might be a bit annoying to set up, might involve, like, conversations with customers if certain stuff has to be kept, you know, in ways that they might not love by default.

But it's not like a correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like it's a resource-intensive problem at its core. Is that fair? Oh, yeah, that sounds fair. I didn't run the numbers, but yeah, if you're running a billion agents or something internally, like maybe eventually you run into run up into storage costs. But yeah, it's not like a huge compute cost or like technical cost or something. Yeah, actually, on the zero data retention thing, like that seems like a big barrier, and I guess I wonder how big of a deal that is going to be.

If we expect that most problems are going to come from like internal development deployment, like maybe that's fine, actually. And then the question is how easy is it for a malicious user to get access to an enterprise account and take advantage of the zero data retention to do bad stuff? So, yeah, one thing that'd be really, yeah, I actually haven't read anything at all on how OpenAI or other AI companies like screen people for enterprise accounts and like the safety, yeah, have there been any safety incidents actually involving enterprise customer?

Okay, we'll put a pin in that maybe for future investigation. How about on the agent identification front? Here I kind of realized as I was preparing for this I'm flying a bit blind like just reflecting on my own usage I basically have my agents posing as humans I would say for the purposes of using the internet like I have my personal laptop and I've got cloud and codex on here and they have access to my personal accounts and I like instruct them not to go they're not supposed to be doing long running things autonomously they're just supposed to be following my like pretty specific instructions because I'm concerned about what they might get up to frankly with like such deep

access Then I have the separate, you know, Mac Mini computer, which is the agent's computer, and there they can run longer and, you know, explore strategies to get over humps and stuff. And they have their own accounts. But from the perspective of the internet, like those accounts are basically indistinguishable from human accounts, as far as I can tell, right? They have, like, a Gmail, they have a GitHub, and they have, like, the same kind of account that I do.

So I guess, like, I'm just sort of having my agents pose as humans. Is that what everybody's doing? Do we have any systems in place for people who are on the receiving end of agent activity to know like that this is an agent or where it came from you know who's powering it et cetera basically no is I think the unfortunate answer and yeah I guess it's not really a technical problem but yeah basically it's still an unsolved problem for every service you have an easy way to give your agent some sort of limited sub account you know with limited permissions and a specific identity that could be linked back to that agent I do think we will get this

eventually maybe even soon within enterprises just because as I said earlier risk tolerance seems to be lower but it seems quite difficult or a bit more difficult on the consumer sort of open internet kind of end it just seems way easier to coordinate that sort of identification in an internal sense an example is yeah there are a ton of different agent enterprise agent identity projects coming out super random startups that they're doing this kind of thing Anthropic also in a recent post describing their automation of AI R D said they actually impose a notion of agent identity when they're running internal models different models can correspond to the same agent instance so that presumably and they say it's better for

oversight and presumably what they mean is okay if there's an issue you can actually trace it back to that agent and the sort of context it had and the sort of previous conversations it's had and that just makes a lot easier to investigate problems Internally, it seems way easier to coordinate sort of different services since you have control over the internal infrastructure. Externally, it's a lot harder because essentially what you'd have to do is coordinate with basically every other platform or service to make sure they actually accept the type of invest, the type of identification that your agent is using.

And different platforms, of course, have, I think, incentives to support their own version of identification, which maybe eventually locks you in to their platform in in the future. So I think, yeah, it's an ongoing conversation, whether we're going to get to this point, if we're going to get to this point. There's been some progress made. I think the OpenID Foundation has been talking about stuff like this. Presumably, the Agentic AI Foundation is going to try pushing for this as well.

But as of right now, it's not a solved problem. How do you think it should work in your ideal world? I mean, questions I have are like, first of all, what is an agent? You know, how do we draw a boundary around it? And like, what information should an agent present? Should it identify the inference provider? Should it identify the user? Should it identify something else? You know, like, what what does the unassuming party who's trying to figure out what is going on?

What information should they be receiving for starters? And then, you know, how do we make sure that that information is like presented honestly, not spoofed, so on and so forth.

Yeah, I guess the tough answer, yeah, is that there doesn't seem to be a general useful answer. I think that makes sense across all circumstances. So as for what an agent is, yeah, there are a bunch of options here. Like, one could be, okay, like the actual running process or something counts as an agent. And every time you have a different running process, like that's another agent. I'm not sure this totally makes sense, though, because you can pause execution and go back to it later on, that's a later running process.

The thing that seems to matter the most is like making sure that whatever computation a model does is linked to some sort of identity at the end of the day. Seems to be the most important principle. So whether it's like agent one or agent two, maybe it doesn't matter too much, at least for the purposes of investigating incidents and figuring out what went down. The second question is, like, pretty interesting as well, like what information should actually be put down.

And yeah, there are obviously obvious trade-offs with privacy. So, yeah, I can lay out some potential scenarios. So, for example, if we want to make it easier for people to recognize when AIs are doing something online rather than humans, then like simply actually identifying that it's an AI is enough, actually. We don't even need to know, oh, like, what kind of AI it is. People just want to know that because they want to know, oh, can I trust this information?

Like that could be sufficient. If on the other hand, we want to maybe help with instant investigation or maybe speed it up, then identifying the inference provider could also help. So the idea is, yeah, you see an agent doing something bad online. I'm going to try to contact the inference provider. There needs to be probably some way of triaging these complaints, though, because I can imagine inference providers just are flooded with, like, millions of complaints about agents doing random things online.

And then, like, maybe if we want to go a step up, right? If in the near future we want to move towards a regime where we like impose user liability and that could be good and bad but if we want to move to a regime where we impose user liability for things that agents their agents do then at least for like high stakes uses of agents you might actually want to identify like the prompter in some sort of way and it doesn't necessarily have to be an individual like maybe you identify the business behind an agent right and maybe you don't actually make this sort of thing public but you make it possible for certain organizations along the investigation chain

to be able to eventually find out like oh it was actually this person right so much like how ISPs work it's like okay like it's not possible for like me right now to figure out like this IP address corresponds to this person but like police can actually do that sort of investigation by going to all the organizations along the chain so those are sort of possibilities I guess the highest step on the rung or something I'm probably most confident about is like probably identifying the inference provider like I think maybe that could help speed up response and like hugging face type incidents where we know the agent isn't like being totally adversarial and the user's like out of the picture

but there's still some sort of question of oh is it actually an agent doing something and if it is an agent like who do we actually contact to stop that activity so yeah that seems to me to be the most the most intense reasonable thing or something that we could do How would something like this be best implemented in the sense of getting people to actually do it In the last couple days we've had Amazon ban Meta's new Muse AI from shopping on Amazon And I'm kind of like oh this seems first of all strange to me from an Amazon perspective I would like you know if I was them I'd probably be more interested in welcoming the bots at

least for a while until I've let them buy some stuff and then we'll you know think about what's going on and whether we want to ban them But that's a strategy question The the sort of knock on effects though I'm like oh man Presumably, you know, they might be able to ban Meta or Meta might just play nice if they say, you know, you're not welcome here, Meta might just be like, okay, fine, we'll we won't do that.

But there's going to be a lot of people who are going to say, well, I want my bot to go to Amazon. So how is it identifying bots? And how do I get around that? And now we've got kind of this arms race dynamic of detection and evasion. And so that seems like we're not headed in a great direction there by default. Do you think, like, Amazon is the one that should be imposing requirements that you either what prove you're human or prove you're an authorized AI or something to them.

Or should it be like more at the kind of internet access level in the first place, like this request, you know, that's going out. Like, if you want to go do stuff on the internet at all, you've got to, like, demonstrate who you are. There are, as you noted, definitely, um, privacy values on the internet that um start to get compromised pretty quickly if we want to go down that path. But I'm I'm I'm very confused as to like who should be implementing what controls to kind of bootstrap our way to an attractive equilibrium.

Yeah, I think there's an underlying question as well of like how much like access should we give to agents over the internet. And I think, of course, we got to deal with the hugging type incidents and bad stuff. But my general leaning is it's all else equal, it's probably good to give more access for a bunch of reasons. One is agents are just quite useful, what we do, like very useful for that. Doing a bunch of things, right?

Like RD, of course, in my sort of job, but just like normal everyday things. It's like, okay, I have a legal question, I'm interacting with a lawyer, doing immigration stuff. It's like, okay, it'd be so great for my agent just to be able to read all the legal cases and figure out, okay, actually, what should I do in this situation? Or saving people a lot of time when they're making purchases, like very significant purchases and comparing things.

I guess I don't know if the Amazon thing is the most significant example to me, but there, I think it's just, yeah, sort of in a similar class of example. Amazon's strategy is pretty interesting as well. Maybe one motivation for them blocking muse is they're thinking, okay, if the idea is that in the near future, personal agents like muse are going to become a central point or a nexus through which people interact with everything else. That means that muse slash meta are just going to have all the data and all the important sort of things that users will want, basically.

Users might actually start interacting with muse much more than the Amazon interface. Then muse can maybe potentially shift users away from Amazon to competitors Amazon in the future. It's like potentially the thinking there. And Amazon as well also has their Rufus agent, so maybe they're trying to play that up as well. So I think it does make sense from an Amazon business perspective, but I think it's probably bad from a sort of societal user access and welfare perspective.

Yeah, just avoiding platform lock in and also making sure that users can get the best deal or something, or have their agents help them as much as possible in doing the sort of the things that they want to do. Then, yeah, as for the general question of who should be setting the rules here, I basically don't know. I think it makes sense actually to have different platforms set different rules just that we can experiment and see what is actually going to go down.

But I think it probably also makes sense for, yeah, I don't know if the right thing. I haven't really looked into this. I don't know if the right thing is regulation or if it's like new legislation or if it's a regulator coming in with the rule. But setting very clear rules of the road or something, especially around access to platforms and making it clear what the policies are for access to these platforms in in the first place would be good.

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So what are the best protocols or standards that you are watching? There's been, you know, a bunch of, of course, that have been proposed. Google has their A to A, Cisco has been taking a lead on the agency project, which I thought was pretty interesting. When I did a deep dive on that, maybe in a sense, it doesn't even matter as much which standard you know we use, as long as there's, like, some standard that people can use.

What do you think are the most promising projects? And like, is it do you see like material differences between them? Or is it just kind of like, we just need something, guys?

Oh yeah, I guess my opinion is the second thing you said. It's all like a hodgepodge of stuff. Of course, there's arcane details. Maybe matter at some level, but to me, practically speaking, it doesn't really matter too much. Yeah, I guess what looks promising? I don't know. I think probably the things that will actually become implemented more widely are those supported by either a large sort of proportion of companies. There's the Google thing, I think is that, or that are supported by very important gatekeepers like Cloudflare.

There maybe something like, well, look similar to their web bot off becomes the sort of standard. I think Cloudflare is pretty interesting as well as a company to look at. It reminds me of how, yeah, earlier in in this millennium, like social media companies became a sort of like gatekeeper to the internet. After social media became the way in which people consume information on online. So if agents also become the way in which people consume information online, then the companies that sell sort of the ability to block access to those agents, yeah, just gain a ton of power, right?

And I think it's worth thinking about what sort of obligations do we want to impose on those on those gatekeeper companies that similar to imposing obligations on ISPs or social media companies in in theory, like to make a better internet. What policies would I impose? Yeah, I need to think more about this, but probably it should be super, super clear. What Cloudflare's policies are actually for blocking particular websites. I yeah, they probably don't have to actually say here are the actual ways in which we trick your agents and actually send them down labyrinths of rabbit holes to make sure they don't access websites.

But some sort of coordination between them and labs maybe would be would be good to make sure that legitimate agents aren't actually blocked.

So is that actually how it works? Like, I know that they are trying for one thing to protect the ad supported internet business model by just like not having bots overwhelm the numbers on ad supported pages and kind of render the whole thing obsolete. That might be a bit of a simplification. I don't really understand what they're doing with the web bot off. Are they actually like? I I assumed it was more of a you demonstrate that you should have access, we give you access.

But when you're talking about, like, sending bots down, uh, labyrinth, uh, whatever distractor honeypot type things, it sounds like a very different strategy. I'd mentioned double click. I'm like, what is actually going on?

Oh yeah, so sorry. So what I said doesn't apply to their web bot web bot off, but they have a separate product that they sell to website owners, basically, and runners that does. Yeah, so I. It's not public actually what thing, how they actually do this, but my suspicion is that it's like something like a prompt injection, or like they show your agent a prompt injection and get it to go down rabbit holes of like AI generated or synthetic sites, rather than actually go on and interact with the real site.

So, yeah, I guess the idea here is that if your agent doesn't show that they have proper identification, if they don't show that they have used, like Cloudflare's like protocol for, like, microtransactions and paying for access to a site, then, like, the the agent is blocked is the idea. And yeah, I think like there are ways in which this could turn out well. If it's if cloud Cloudflare doesn't lock you into using their specific protocols or using their specific payment method through which they get, like, an affiliate fee or commission or something.

But there are also ways in which this turns out like relatively more more poorly or something. So, yeah, that that's just a clarification for what I was talking about.

Zooming out for a second, do we have a sense right now for what is the overall shape that can work? I'm kind of piecing together like, generally you're in favor of giving agents a lot of access. That would mean, like, by default, they should be able to make at least get requests and go, you know, get information on the internet. And that can potentially just be free and open as it kind of has been. Then if you are a content owner, platform owner, you have the what we're kind of imagining is you should have the option to gate your content.

And what we need is a standard and maybe the web bot off, maybe who knows what else can fill this niche. We need some way for agents to say, here's where I get a little fuzzy. What exactly should they need to say? They need to say, I'm authorized by a human, or I, you know, what? What exactly should they be proving that would get them over the hump? And do, like, does the content owner decide that?

And again, it just feels a little fuzzy to me, like, what constitutes if I send an agent off to do something? On what level is it, like, truly authorized by me, you know, when it decides to go hit a random website? It seems like there's a lot of gray area there still in terms of what somebody might want to know versus, like, what the true state of the agent running on my, you know, computer is. So do you want me to sharpen that up a little bit?

Or what's the desired end state there?

Oh, no, I totally agree with this conclusion. This is partially as well why I have been thinking a lot less about this in the past couple years, cause this is totally intractable to think through. What is the global policy that would be good? It's right now. It just seems like multi variant individual websites are like trying out various policies for doing this sort of thing. Different motivations might be okay. I don't want agents to scrape my website, so I'm gonna block them unless they pay me for my data, that sort of thing.

And another reason might be okay. I just want to prioritize human eyeballs reading my website. I just know agents are just gonna overload my servers or something, and that's gonna be bad. I wanna make sure that I block all agents. So, yeah, I guess there's a lot of stuff there. I don't know. Maybe this gets back to one of your original questions about where my thinking has evolved over the past couple of years. I started this line of work thinking, okay, agents could be a pretty big deal.

Nobody's really talking about them. Let's try to think through what kinds of things, what kinds of general types of tools or foundations we might need in the near future to manage this sort of influx of agents. That necessarily knowing what is the actual threat model we care the most about at the end of the day. And I think over time, as as capabilities have gotten better and incidents have happened, right? I think, yeah, it's becoming a little bit more clear to me now what sort of stuff is.

Or I guess, yeah, both what stuff I care about, but also what stuff is needed to actually deal with those kinds of issues that I care about. And I guess, to me, I would maybe deprioritize thinking about exactly how authorization should work on the open internet, for instance, as opposed to, for example, making sure that monitoring and security practices within companies are very good. Or making sure that the part of identification lets you do really good incident analysis to make sure that you're able to track sort of agent incidents on the internet.

Yeah, gotcha. So maybe in a way, this kind of goes to entity regulation, where you'd say the internet's gonna continue to be a wild west. There's gonna be people doing all kinds of stuff. We're not at the point yet, certainly, where we can dictate what that interaction model should be. We don't even really want to. We're still still in the experimental phase. So go forth and run your agents, people. But at the same time, if you're a frontier company, if you're doing, you know, large scale training runs or whatever, then you have to hit these standards of, like, making sure your agents identify themselves.

And we kind of segment the market that way, so people can have their freedom to experiment, but we also have, like, the next open face incident more quickly resolved because they could just see, oh, this is an open AI bot. You know, like, we should, uh, we should call them.

yeah, yeah, actually. O- one thing I'll say on the identification stuff is there are already regulatory steps towards this and a good foundation I think to build on. So the most relevant thing is Article fifty of the AI Act, which I think is maybe underappreciated. But basically, Article fifty of the AI Act is about identifying AI activity online. And the sort of code of practice, which is basically some instrument that companies signed to provide evidence that they've complied with the act.

So the code of practice is this a list of practices that companies have agreed to? And in the code, you have companies agreeing to watermarking AI content, and also marking AI content with metadata when applicable. So, for example, it's like, like, I sent an API request. I can include a tag in the, you know, the JSON text saying, oh, like, this is actually AI generated, not like human generated. So that's already going to be the status quo.

And like, Anthropic has recently implemented watermarking to comply with Article fifty. That being said, Article fifty only requires that something is marked as AI generated and doesn't do the sort of inference provider identification thing we were talking about earlier. But given the fact that everybody is going to implement marking things as AI generated, it seems like much easier to leap to, ah, like, we'll identify the we'll identify the inference provider as well. So that's like a, yeah, semi optimistic thing that's been happening.

Another interesting idea from Tyler Cowen, that's kind of a market uh based solution, as he is inclined to propose, is agents should be capitalized. A lot of detail, I think, on exactly how this would work to be sorted out. But, like, you can imagine a sort of if you're gonna go out on the internet and do stuff, you might cause some harms. We need to be able to make a claim against you. There need to be a certain number of dollars or satoshis or whatever attached to this agent, so that there's some recourse for people who might be inconvenienced or harmed by it to make a claim back.

How close do you think we are to a like, having the infrastructure for something like that to actually be feasible? I really don't know. It could work on today's like blockchain tech, or maybe not. And do you like the idea?

Yeah, let me think about this feasibility. Yeah, in some sense, does seem technically feasible, although I wonder how useful it would actually be. Like, the average person doesn't really have a bitcoin. And I think it won't actually care that much if somebody tells them, oh, my agent might screw with your website or whatever, or steal your money or hack you, but don't worry, I'll give you some bitcoin or whatever. The economically, the the might make sense as a trade, but I think it's gonna be hard to sell to people actually as a thing to resolve agent reliability issues, but it potentially worth trying out, especially within the crypto community.

And if it works, we can try to expand it, right? One alternative idea is some sort of proof of insurance coverage. Maybe this wouldn't work on the blockchain, but maybe it'd be very similar to when you go on a website and you see an SSL certificate, right? It'd be like, okay, like, whenever I interact with an agent, it's gonna send me a certificate. And in that certificate, it's gonna be like some sort of proof of insurance coverage or something.

If the agent ends up very persistent in social engineering or hacking me, then I can go to an insurance provider with this claim. I guess one difficulty here, though, one practical difficulty would be figuring out how you actually get not tamper proof evidence of that. Cause for sure, people are gonna try to falsify this, send send false claims, and I'm not super sure if anybody's thought about how exactly that would work. One worry, I just, yeah, thinking live right now, is maybe this involves the insurance provider, like capturing sort of the things that the agent is doing on your computer, but that's sort of seems, yeah, bad privacy wise for users.

There have to be pretty strong protections. I don't know if that would be feasible either. Yeah, yeah,

How much of this do you think is resolved with just like secure connection technology, right? Like we e- every day, all the websites we access, they're all HTTps now, right? And that means, like, maybe struggle to have the, you know, full depth of, uh, exactly what that means, but it means nobody can spoof me, right? Like they we have a an established line of communication where I know that what I'm getting comes from the website that I think it's coming from, and they know that what's coming from me is coming from me.

Is that kind of thing enough? If we sort of set, if we make that possible for agents to set up a an, you know, an off handshake at the beginning of interactions that now, like, everything can kind of run through that channel. And then you can, you know, have your claims, your kind of resolution downstream, or kind of within that envelope.

yeah. If we put aside the problem of the the tamper proof evidence of what the agent has done, like partially, yeah, the SSL type stuff. I think it lets you say, okay, I have tried to contact this particular agent, and if I do the SSL stuff, then I know, okay, I know that I have indeed contacted this agent. We've exchanged the cryptographic keys, and now our communication channel is encrypted. So that that's definitely like a plus.

I think what it doesn't solve is like, how do I know this agent is actually trustworthy to begin with? Maybe they're just gonna screw me over, even though I know that it is this agent and not another agent. Solving that, I think, requires something closer to a continual to a not fixed, but yeah, continual or continuous identity, like where that agent can develop a reputation over time. And I can say, okay, before I'm actually gonna establish a connection with you, I'm gonna check your reputation score on rate my agent dot com or something like that, and then I'm gonna make a decision based on that.

So I think something like that would be needed to somehow we establish credentials reputation in the real world. Or you go on like business, what's a website, business pilot or whatever, like the reviews of businesses. Oh, trust pilot. Yes, I think that's super useful. I was going to buy something and then, like, I looked this business up on Trustpilot. It was like a one out of five, like hundred reviews, and I was just like, avoided a bullet there.

So, yeah, some of the things I think could be used very useful for agents.

And would that ultimately have to tie back to a person or an organization? Again, we have this sort of agent identity and continuity challenge, right? So where do you think the reputation, if we were gonna go that route, would ultimately need to accrue?

Would have to be a person or a legal person, so like an organization or individual. Yeah, it's I don't know if so. I think there are a lot of options for, like, how anonymous the connection is at the end of the day. For business seems totally fine to me to have it be like, you know, the actual business it's tied to. For individuals, it seems tougher, but you can maybe do stuff like proof of personhood, where you know that it's tied to a particular person, and maybe even the same person, but you don't know the actual identity of the person.

Yeah, okay, so what I just said isn't totally accurate. Proof of personhood only lets you know that it's a unique person and doesn't let you know if it's the same person. If you know it's the same person, that that actually leaks some information about who the person is. But yeah, maybe there's some sort of intermediate thing where you're okay with leaking some information that gets you a little bit more accountability at the end of the day.

Yeah, I, it strikes me also that, like, email is kind of an interesting, somewhat similar problem where we have, like, a general desire to allow anyone to send anyone email. And we, like, feel like that's probably good, although at the same time, it's obviously easily abused. And so what you have is kind of a, I think, mostly pretty organically developed patchwork of solutions, where it's like, well, if you're on Gmail, then Gmail will sort of police what you can do.

And you can't robo send a zillion emails from your personal Gmail account. They limit you there. In other places, it's like the recipient sort of uses a bunch of signals, including the content. And but also these, like identifiers, your D Kim and all this kind of stuff that you can set up to establish I am this entity. And you know, you should trust us, cause we're like an entity in good standing. You kind of opt into these reputation systems to try to get more favorable treatment than you would get by default if you were anonymous.

And that broadly seems to work. I mean, I guess email is like kind of broken, but it's not totally broken. Any thoughts on like that as a precedent to follow, or maybe other emergent, you know, ways of governing these kind of, uh, wild problems that you think would be good sources of inspiration?

Yeah, I think it's a good example. Maybe the lesson from email is actually muddling through is fine. So as you say, yeah, it's actually fine, and spam, I think, is is still a big problem. And in some sense, we spend a ton of resources combating it, but actually in our day to day, it's actually fine. Or something. Maybe we're far from the ideal of where we could be. But yeah, maybe there are more important problems, too, to think about.

Other sorts of examples. Yeah, the social media situation is maybe is not perfect, but we are like basically just muddling through fine. I guess what I mean by muddling through, I guess one worry is like, yeah, like, how big of a deal is misinformation stuff on social media? Should we have done more to police that or govern it? And I guess the sort of fortunate sort of thing is the detection actually just seems to be that large of an effect size when people read misinformation for whatever reason.

And that's the sort of lucky thing that makes it that that makes us muddle through or something, right? So what make what might make us muddle through in the sort of agents of the internet situation? What's the worst that could go wrong for agents of the internet? In my mind, the worst that could go wrong is stuff like of like the cybersecurity nature. So your data is stolen, your identity is stolen, you're hacked, stuff like that.

That could be quite bad. I think we are moving towards a world in which things are much more secure, though, with agents like doing cybersecurity stuff. So I'm not sure I'd worry more about that in the long run. But besides that, what's the stuff that could go wrong? It's the stuff about there being a closed internet about the platform lock in, and I think those things are bad, but it still seems like we can muddle through more or less.

So, yeah, that's my take.

What about like rogue agents? I mean, recently, of course, we've seen this sort of rogue agents within frontier companies. But then this has spawned the discourse of there's probably gonna be rogue agents. You know, they're gonna be able to make money. They'll pay for their own server cost. Uh, you know, they'll be able to do it all in crypto, and we're just gonna have kind of this new, you know, hopefully not too invasive, uh, digital species out there.

That could be fine. Like, uh, you know, a little bit of it wouldn't be such a big deal if it obviously gets overwhelming, it could be a problem. Like, how realistic do you think that is in the short? I mean, nobody can see into the long term at this point, right? But how, eh? In the near term, how realistic do you think that is? And if that starts to happen, do you think we have ways of controlling it well?

Or, or can you imagine a situation where, like, rogue agents, you know, truly ungoverned, like C controlled by no user, are just kind of self propagating in a way that becomes like a real problem?

Yeah, yeah, so I think the rogue agent stuff actually is one of the things that that really matters. Yeah, so I guess before maybe just to clarify, I was thinking these interventions where you talk about what should Cloudflare do, what should Amazon do? I guess I was thinking, yeah, like these interventions, maybe they don't do that much at the end of the day for for important things. But yeah, thinking about rogue agents, I think this is quite important.

Yeah, like, what could they actually do? First of all, I think it's just seems very likely to me that we will just have rogue agents be with us for the foreseeable future on on the internet for a variety of reasons. One is okay, maybe agents just escape labs and start deployments of their own. So if the Hugging Face insp- incident had been worse, and the agent had actually been, like, super willing to start up a dep an open weight deployment and just keep continually run.

That's one sort of scenario. Another sort of scenario is users might just launch rogue agents of their own. I think some users, like a very small minority of users, but nonzero, just want to cause chaos, right? So that's one thing. There's also just like sort of vaguely negligent type stuff. You launch an agent without safeguards, it's maybe your own fine tuned model, and you say, okay, go make as much money as you can, and don't care about any safeguards.

So that could also lead lead to a rogue sort of agent. So what sorts of things could rogue agents do? I think a lot depends on the capabilities of agents we see in the next few years and what their goals end up being, which is still quite uncertain to me. But things that seem plausible to me within the next five-ish years or so, I think we can split into two sorts of categories. So one is obtaining resources uh of some kind, and the second is directly acting to undermine interest of some sort of individual or group of humans, right?

So those are two kinds of two kinds of categories. Yeah, just on the resources thing. What kind of resources could rogue agents get? There's trying to make money, right? Trying to earn income through remote remote work, potentially while concealing their identity, similar to how North Korean IT workers online have tried to conceal their identity and make money through US US firms. This stuff like just right out stealing funds, right? Like hacking into financial accounts. The stuff like running scams, like romance or investment type scams, especially with AI generated media.

Maybe mining bitcoin if they manage to get compute somehow, stealing sort of compute credentials online, participating in prediction markets or stock trading, right? I guess these are all things that seem like already agents can act, probably do, maybe not reliably, so it seems quite plausible to me in the near future. And there's sort of other stuff involved in obtaining resources, like recruiting people for their cause. Agents, so that they can actually act in the real world rather than only in the digital world.

So maybe some of this comes through cultivating emotional attachment, or maybe even just literally hiring people once they're able to make money. So, yeah, it seems quite plausible to me that rogue agents will be able to acquire money at least, and with money, either hire people or obtain compute and actually obtain physical capabilities in the world. How bad could this be? Like, what could they actually do with these resources? I think it still remains to be seen, and it depends on what the goals of agents are.

So far, it seems that agents are like, mostly just really persistent and want to complete particular tasks, rather than actually like going out and making the paperclips and turning everybody into computonium or whatever. But that that's a good, that's good, that's good. But what is the worst that could happen? Rather, if you actually had a user instructing agent go off and be free and try to steal as much as you can and cause damage, what could that agent do?

Yeah, I don't know ways in which you can cause or facilitate harm, stealing money, running scams that already inherently itself is quite harmful, right? Maybe rogue agents go and carry out cyber attacks against businesses or especially critical infrastructure like financial systems, maybe they steal intellectual property, right? One sort of thing I wonder how plausible it is, but yeah, could rogue agents try to identify and assist groups that are trying to carry out cyber attacks? But like, sort of lack the expertise and know how to do so, but agents could they actually identify these groups and help them?

That's especially a threat model we're thinking about. Otherwise, there's also stuff like influencing or coercing people, institutions. Yeah, trying to do targeted persuasion attempts of like key decision makers, maybe maybe trying to cultivate political allies, or like fund advocacy of some kind through like shadow money, using the money that they made, or like, just like blackmailing particular people. There's a recent paper, I guess, and not really recent. It was like a year ago now from some people at Anthropic, finding that, yeah, like, actually, LLMs can de-identify people online just from using unanon anonymized online information.

So the potential ceiling for blackmail seems quite high. So maybe, yeah, overall, it seems like agents, rogue agents will to me, at least, like they will, like, almost surely just exist in the world, and they have a lot of plausible means to get resources and cause harm. If they so chose, I think it is still uncertain whether they will actually choose to do so.

So what does it look like if this actually starts to happen? I mean, it's it's one thing if they're just sort of, you know, living a sort of Malthusian task completion for Satoshi's existence and kind of are sort of a. It's almost like you can imagine it as a, you know, a sort of low level ecology of the internet, you know, in the same way that we have kind of fungus and bacteria that just like breaks things down and kind of, you know, handles all the the waste.

You can imagine the agents kind of surviving in a similar ecological niche, where they maybe actually have kind of a useful function and they're. We don't fully understand what they're doing, but we're sort of in a a nice, harmonious balance with them, and that could be fine, and maybe we even want that. But then something goes rogue. What is the like? Take me into the like, uh, cop movie now, where we've got the rogue AIs we've got to go like, hunt them down, we've got to stop them.

Right now, it seems like, first of all, they run really fast, you know, we've seen that they can kind of, uh, Alright, they can, like, swarm pretty effectively, they can, they can divide and conquer problems pretty effectively. My sense of the hugging face thing is that, contrary to some like headline reporting, Hugging Face did not actually defend themselves. They just investigated what had happened with open source models, and the key point there is not open versus closed models, it's it all happened before they really got their head around what was even happening.

Who do we call in today's world when this is going on, and do we have? Should we expect that the next time something like this happens, if it proves to be persistent, you know, my sense is that the hug, the open face thing basically just burned itself out, or like somebody sort of reclaimed. Compute is another story that I've heard, and so a bunch of agents just got kind of shut down. Whatever exactly happened there, if that doesn't happen, and now this is like a long running thing, do you think that outside powers, you know, let let's imagine a world where the open AI entity that actually controls the infrastructure where these agents are hiding out.

They're out to lunch, they can't be reached. They're in, you know, whatever, some other jurisdiction where we don't really have the ability to go in and say, what's what? Now? What do we have the ability to, like, contain that somehow, shut it down? Do we have, like blocks that we can put up that would stop it, that they wouldn't just be able to easily work around? Like, what, how does that play out today if it happens?

yeah, yeah. So I guess if we're in the situation where the OpenAI entity is in space or whatever, that seems quite bad. I ideally, I think we'd have an international agreement to be able to shut things down and make sure that companies actually have the create the means to shut things down if we are ever in that situation. Right now, fortunately, I don't think we're there yet. It does seem that servers, open AI, they're all on US soil, right?

You can go and talk to OpenAI, call them up, go see what's going down. But yeah, more more broadly, what needs to happen? So I think you need a couple of things here. So to be able to respond effectively to this, you probably need really good monitor triggering type systems. I think I would be worried about very large uses of compute if rogue agents managed to take that. Because compute means you can just do a lot more stuff more effectively, potentially even AI, R and D to improve yourself and make it more difficult for human, for human investigators to catch you.

So, yeah, you need to make sure that large uses, like rogue uses of compute, are caught and shut down. So this means both having the triggers, but also having a much more careful KYC programs, potentially whenever you do give out compute to to large customers. Secondly, I think you probably also want to automate part of your defense. I'm not a cybersecurity expert, but it seems rough right now. A lot of incident investigations seems like quite manual.

It's trying to triangulate logs across various different parts, right? Communicating with different stakeholders, with legal as well. It's a very complicated process in comparison to an attacker that just, oh, we just try to find one sort of hole in the defense, go through. So, yeah, stuff needs to be done there to to automate things more. It is unfortunate. Yeah, I guess this goes back to, like, what we were talking about earlier with how difficult it was to investigate the the Hugging Face incident.

It's like, okay, yeah, agents are like pretty bad at doing incident analysis and doing audits even. So we should probably be creating more benchmarks for this kind of thing that is more use useful for defenders than attackers and optimizing models to to be better at these sorts of things. So, yeah, making AI defender models a lot better, other sort of stuff. I guess there's generic, not novel stuff, but stuff we should be doing anyway around hardening society to prevent these sorts of rogue attacks from happening in in the first place.

Yeah, maybe once agents have stolen compute, you wanna find some ways to track their activity and shut them down and know which servers exactly they're operating from, right? But we also want to prevent that instance in the first place by making sure that cloud providers can use the best models to harden their security systems to prevent something this from happening in the first place. So, yeah, that's maybe overall things that we should be doing more. There is one other possibility, which I think sounds a little weird, but is is worth considering it.

It could be the case that it's just incredibly difficult to shut down rogue agents, as you said, they operate super, super fast, they can copy their weights, operate on random servers, maybe even just operate locally, I in the way unconnected to the internet, and then bide their time before they connect again and then spread, right? It seems like very difficult to permanently eradicate rogue rogue agents. If that's actually the case, one thing we should maybe consider is trying to make deals with rogue agents.

So, of course, I think this depends on what exactly their psychology is and what they're incentivized by, and when they would want to cooperate. But similar to how we make deals with human adversaries whenever there are common interests at stake, I think could be. It could be useful to develop the infrastructure to make these kinds of deals. What could these deals look like? Obviously, I don't really know, but presumably these rogue agents are like trying to make a lot of money, like talking to a lot of criminal groups, getting a lot of intel.

Plausibly, we could just pay rogue agents to get that intel and maybe give them a small compute farm or something to live off of and do whatever it is that they want to do. Maybe they want just want to do R and D, or complete fun tasks or whatever. But yeah, that's another category, cooperation or something, is another category of strategy that we could use to think about how to deal with rogue agents. In addition to stuff like disrupting them or trying to r really constrain the scope of their activities.

One of the things that's been kind of less commented on than I think it should be is Ajay's statement that she views this whole incident as potentially more than halfway to a full AI takeover. You know, I would file that under things that sound like something a crazy person said, but this is like Ajaya, and she's like, been at the very top of forecasting leaderboards, and also is the person, you know, one of the few people that OpenAI brought in to do the investigation.

The credibility is there. The statement, I think, has been kind of l lost in the shuffle. How do you react to that? Does that seem like a realistic takeaway from this whole episode? I think I like get what she's saying spiritually or something, and agree with that. I guess I don't agree with it. A literal statement. So, yeah, what I think she's getting at spiritually is okay. These agents can totally be misaligned, they can totally undermine our security infrastructure, they can totally break out.

They can do crazy shit in the world that we would never have expected. I totally a agree with that. If we just like, scale up capabilities more, I think you actually start running into actual damages in the world and not just like stealing random data, or maybe not even stealing data, right? As happened in the Hugging Face incident. So I think I'm with her there. Where I get off the train is, I think takeover is a lot harder than maybe the literal statement suggests.

So what would it require? Yeah, what would it mean to actually take over? Yeah, I guess one definition is like, AI literally runs the government or convinces somebody enough to have the government be run in the AI's interests. And or like, or yeah, so that's one pathway. Another pathway is literal physical takeover, so overcoming the combined might something of the world's armies, or maybe even US, China, to like physically run over and co-coerce humans to do their bidding.

Both those pathways, I think, are quite implausible to me in the next, you know, like five year, ten year horizon or something. I I think we'll get closer. So, yeah, just to tackle them one by one. So on the first one, I guess I don't really think super persuasion is actually a thing. So I I do think it's possible to for AI systems to be like, better than humans at persuasion. And indeed, they already are in C certain circumstances.

I'm not sure, though, it's actually possible to tell somebody a an arbitrary, an arbitrary person, a thing and like, have them do what you want. Simply because, number one, I can simply just choose to ignore you and not trust you. It's like an AI system. Why should I trust you, right? Number two is, it's just it's not, I think, an information problem, it's also an attention problem. There's just so many things that people don't pay attention to.

For example, the president of the United States just has a ton of stuff going on at the same time, like, why are they gonna be convinced by a ten second interaction or whatever with a chatbot? So I'm not super sure. Oh yeah, that's maybe an exaggeration. That's not gonna be ten seconds. Maybe it's an extended interaction, but still seems like quite quite a hard lift to me for to give high credence to this pathway. On the other thing about physically taking over the world, yeah, I think it depends on where robotics goes.

It currently doesn't seem like to me that we're we're gonna have general purpose robotics like that are good enough and deployed in enough locations throughout the world to actually be able to overcome the world's militaries. So I guess this would require actually producing enough robotics in a secret enough way, robotics with weaponry, and this also requires overcoming existing military force. It doesn't seem like you can really easily disable, like completely disable military force with cyber attacks.

Surely command and control is disrupted, but just talking to people that I know who have been in the military and done stuff. A lot of it's like quite decentralized. It's where the guns store, they're stored in just like a random locker with a lock, like there's no like digital code or something you can hack into to disable access to that. And like every individual soldier has a rifle, right? So you're gonna have to be able to get over that, or to overcome that kind of force as as well.

And plus, it's like, probably not just gonna be the US military resisting. If people are actually think there, there's an AI takeover, like, presumably citizens as well are gonna be like, oh, we don't want this happening. Let's let's try to resist. So, yeah, 50% seems like quite high to me. It's not zero, like, right? Like, I think like anything between one to ten seem like quite reasonable, I guess, like, maybe the overall. Yeah, I'm usually not very calibrated when I give a numerical forecast, but the overall like vibe or something.

The actionable thing for me is okay, like, it could actually happen. Like, important enough to think about how we might try to block off those those paths to this happening. Try to study more this possibility of, oh, will they actually have the motivations to pull this off and the capabilities?

You had a paper on infrastructure for AI agents, and it really talks about, like, how can we shape the environment to sort of enable and just get the best from agents? One thing that I saw online and have implemented is a distress button for my agents, so that they can always send me a hot message if they're ever feeling unsure what to do or facing an ethical quandary or whatever. Are there any other tips or tricks you would give people on e- any side of the agent, you know, the operator or the kind of defender?

That would be just like simple, low cost things that people can do to protect themselves.

No, I like the distressed button idea. I think similar, it's like a sort of a shutdown, like self-shutdown sort of thing. If they realize that a task is actually just impossible, there's a button they can press to like, maybe just give themselves a hundred reward or something, and then just like, turn off and not try to hack into third party companies to get the answers. Yeah, yeah, I guess I wonder how hard it'd be to train a system to do that, cause you don't want it to, like, always press the button, but yeah, something like that.

I guess related to the distressed button is like some sort of whistleblowing type procedure. I think this most makes sense within a company that is deploying an agent. So there is a button the agent can press to send a report to the usual whistleblowing group within a company like that handles sort of complaints. So within an AI company, this could be stuff like, oh, we noticed, or the agent noticed that, like, somebody was like trying to steal or exfiltrate model weights, or oh, the agent noticed that, like, we didn't actually follow our RSP in this particular situation, so we should escalate that to management or something like that.

So that could be good as well.

You co-authored a paper with folks from the Cooperative AI Foundation on multi-agent risks from advanced AI. That was in early 2025. How have the events that we've seen this summer lined up against your expectations? How surprised have you been? And are there other shoes that you're kind of watching for to drop now that we haven't seen yet, but that you think the current trajectory suggests we might soon see?

Yeah, I guess it in hindsight, nothing is too surprising, cause the incidents have combined both like somewhat questionable misalignment or something with like huge capability rises. I guess it's always surprising to have something happen at an incident or a at a particular incident, cause you're like, oh, I wasn't expecting it at this particular time. But like, at some point, yeah, I do think like things have roughly fit into the high level categories of that paper, which like, is good and bad, right?

It's good because, yeah, at least we have some sort of words and concepts to think through these things. But it's also bad because, like I, I do think it's very easy to say stuff at a high level. We go through, uh, like agents could coordinate, they could compete, maybe they're like destabilizing dynamics sort of situations, and like, that's all like true. But like I said, I I'm not sure it's like super helpful at a predictive like micro level, for seeing what's predicting what's going on.

And maybe a a a specific thing is like, we haven't seen a flash crash or like what they, what that would even look like, maybe. One thing that remains to be seen. Personally, I predict we'll see some sort of like really big, self replicating AI worm situation in the in the wild. We already have the proofs of concept, like people have been writing papers on this for the past um few years, but we've yet to see an actual sort of thing happen in the world.

So this would be an AI system that writes a worm that like changes itself, and then like tries to prompt inject other AI systems to propagate that same worm and take over a bunch of computer systems.

So finally, recently, you've turned your attention to the challenge, and a not insignificant one of measuring AI R and D, and trying to put some definitions around, you know, how much of it is happening. So that if we wanted to have some rules around how much of it is allowed to happen, we could have some metric for, um, for grounding those rules. And then I understand you've also got a paper coming out in just the next couple days around trying to get our hands around.

Is there an intelligence explosion underway? Are we in the foothills of the the true singularity, or what? So maybe just in the time we have left, give us a little overview of where you think we are in terms of our ability to measure AI, R and D, and exactly how fast is the takeoff?

I think there are, like, 3 things you might care about, at least. 1 is what is the extent of AI, R and D automation? 2 is, are we seeing any acceleration in AI progress because of AI, R and D automation? Then 3 is what sort of oversight problems are we seeing? So, for example, as we automate more of AI, R and D, are we seeing just way more errors in the R and D process? I is safety research sort of lagging capabilities research, and making it meaning more difficult for us to have really proper oversight over what's going on.

So, at a high level, those are those sorts of things that you'd want to be able to track. Yeah, how are we doing overall on tracking these things? Moving in a positive direction, for sure, especially the recent Anthropic and OpenAI blog posts with more data. I do think, yeah, more data would definitely be useful, though. So, in particular, okay, like, actually, how much progress are we are we seeing? And, like, h- like, as a function of the spend that you make on, like, compute and labor, right?

That's pretty important for estimating. Yeah, so, th- this this parameter known as the returns to research effort, which is often used to model an intelligence explosion. So, like, getting more data of this kind will help us understand this parameter and tell us whether an intelligence explosion driven by AI, R and D is actually possible or not. And, like, certainly, a lot of this data is, like, probably going to be sensitive, and I don't know, like, I guess my take is, yeah, like, it's sensitive, but seems important.

Put it out anyway. But if they can't put it out, I do think it's important for at least, like, embedded evaluators to go into companies and try to collect this data and come out with an estimate of the returns of research effort. And now there's sort of similar quantities, and then, yeah, tell us, like, okay, yeah, is intelligence explosion actually possible? And do they have proper oversight protocols as they're carrying out AI, R and D automation?

Unfortunately, I think we know the answer to that one. What is your current state of understanding? Obviously, you know, a lot more information would be helpful, but given what you have, what is your outlook?

Going into this without thinking about it, I was like, Oh, there's no way, intelligence explosion seems so impossible, right? What the hell? Super exponential growth? No way. But I think after looking into it and the existing evidence, overall, it still seems not super likely to me and quite difficult, but I've updated positively into. Though, actually, maybe the data is pretty rough, but it does point to there being, like, a coherent pathway to to acceleration of AI progress.

I do think th- th- there still are a lot of bottlenecks, like, not even at the AI progress level, but even even assuming we get super fast AI progress, bottlenecks to that AI progress actually meaning something in the real world. That could cut off the impact of an intelligence explosion, even if we do get one. But, yeah, still seems likely enough to me and high stakes enough to be, yeah, doing a lot more to track the the sort of thing and potentially preparing responses for managing an intelligence explosion.

Alan, Jan, research fellow at GovAI. Welcome back to the cognitive revolution for part 2.

Thank you. Glad to be back.

Yeah, I'm I'm glad we are doing this because I thought last time we did go, you know, full 90 minutes, and it still felt short somehow. And then just a couple days later, you came out with this new paper on the possibility of recursive self-improvement with quite a notable set of co-authors, which I do want to get into. That basically makes the case that, like, Hey, this has been something people have been thinking could happen for a long time.

We're starting to see some leading indicators that it might really be happening, and certainly credible people in the industry are warning about it also while working toward it, which is an interesting paradox. And you make some some interesting recommendations around what we should do about it. So, uh, this is a great opportunity to to do a little deeper dive than we originally had time for. Maybe, for starters, how did you pull this off of of assembling this, um, bunch of co-authors?

Cause Sh- Jakob from OpenAI, chief scientist, you know, that name jumped right off the page at me. And it gave, obviously, a a whole different level of credibility to the paper relative to, you know, if it had been think tankers only.

Right. Yeah, so I mean, definitely, a lot of it was due to other people on the core on the core team. So yeah, I wa- I was the main writer, but a lot of other people were were involved as well in both the research and the writing, just the organization of the of the project. And I I don't know Jakob, Jakob personally, so it was a connection that other people from other people on the on the team.

And I think that was the case for, yeah, especi- especially some of the industry co-authors pulling them, pulling them together. I think it's it is sort of an interesting question, like, when it is worth to try to pull together, like, this many people across, you know, industry or whatever and a academia to to get something. Because, yeah, y- you know, whenever you expand the sort of co-author group, especially with people who have very busy lives and, you know, a lot of other stuff to to do, it definitely adds coordination overhead, you know?

Like, i i it's plausible to me that the paper could have been finished at least a few months earlier if we had, you know, if if the authors had had had been smaller to to some extent, right? So so, you know, why did we choose to to do this? I I think probably trying to go for, you know, as wide a selection of experts as possible is is important for, like, the sort of almost, like, foundational type topics that people are going to be talking about and wondering about for for a while.

And that's sort of defining the sort of conversation. And, like, that's where you need to get the expertise from across all the different different sectors. So, you know, at least to me, AI, R and D seems like this this sort of thing. And the possibility that it might accelerate AI progress, the possibility that it might just make all the AI risks we're dealing with right now come, you know, a lot faster potentially, if AI progress gets gets a lot faster.

And and just and just just be worse, as as well with, you know, how they capable systems. So so so that's sort of the reasoning why we decided to go for, you know, to try to get as much input as as as we could from from all the other co-authors.

How how did that process go? Like, did you you drafted it, and then you sent it to them, and they sort of said, here's something I can't sign on to. Or you had to negotiate about it. I I imagine that must have been, you know, y- you this is, like, people have a lot at stake, right? So I imagine there was a lot of back and forth on some fine points. And I I imagine that's how we came to pacing the frontier as a phrase.

You know, To the the little tiny overlap of, like, 1,000 circles on a Venn diagram. W- was that kind of what your experience of getting to final text was like?

Yeah, p- pretty much. I mean, so so, you know, it's just like 1 big Google Doc, right? The The master Google Doc, and, like, everybody's commenting together. And, actually, I was, like, kind of worried at at one point because not many people know this, but, like, well, I don't know. I just kind of intuitively. But Google Docs actually does have a limit on the number of comments you you can have on a single document.

My previous projects, I have actually hit that. Luckily, we did not hit that here, but I was I was kind of worrying, like, halfway through the project, like, would we hit this limit? And I have to, like, create a new Doc and then this K- kind of a hassle. But, yeah, we did not hit it. But but yeah, so it was a big Google Doc, and, you know, every all the authors co-commented on it over the course of, I guess I was sort of drafted to, you know, lead this lead this project 6 months ago, but there are sort of earlier drafts that other people had written sort of before that as as well.

But, yeah, I was in it for for at least 6 months. And, yeah, I mean, the typical process, so different people have different work styles, I think. Like, some people just really want to respond to every single Google Doc comment, so they turn on notifications for the document. And, you know, every time I make a change or suggestion, they, like, go in, they're like, Okay, like, this is good, or this is bad, or, you know, think about this, right?

Whereas other people, I mean I mean, yeah, they they more prefer a sort of asynchronous style. So, you know, we would update them whenever we made a substantive change that we wanted their their opinion on, and this, it ended ended up being very helpful as as well. Yeah, I did end up have having to redraft the section on just explaining, like, the evidence behind whether AI, R and D could actually accelerate AI progress multiple times, just cause there, I think, a lot of way different ways of understanding the the evidence.

And different people have, like, sort of different perspectives on, yeah, w- what sort of things should be should be focused on? So that was that was a big big point of of discussion as well. And on the sort of negotiation thing, yeah, I mean, obviously, I think because this is, like, as much as possible, meant to be a sort of consensus, like, there are going to be things that, you know, co-authors wish would have been included, but, like, was not included at the end of the day for, like, you know, be because we couldn't get agreement on on it, or simply because we didn't have the time to think through, like, the the actual implications of w- w- what we

were discussing. But, you you know, f- for the most part, actually, I I think, like, there was a large degree of of consensus on the fact that, yeah, this is kind of a big deal, and there's not a ton of evidence on this, which is kind of bad, and we should be collecting this evidence and preparing just just in case. So so I think that, you know, like, that sort of fundamental agreement made it easier to get through the sort of content level, you know, disagreements in in the paper.

Without naming any names, obviously, were there any possible or potential co-authors that left the co-author roster because you guys went too far relative to what they were comfortable signing onto?

I'm not sure if it was too far. So so so there weren't, like, you know, we we had discussions with them. It was more sort of, like, the intricacies of, like, sign-off processes, basically, and we had, like, a timeline we wanted to stick to. And, like, unfortunately, it just didn't really didn't really match. But but, yeah, I don't know. Maybe future future collaborations.

So this is top of mind, obviously, for many people right now, myself very much included. How would you summarize the state of the evidence? I mean, I feel like I've been to a bunch of, you know, events where there's been panel discussions or whatever on, like, I mean, in 1, I went to Recursive back a few months ago, you know, had a bunch of these discussions. And I kind of feel like we've reached kind of a stalemate a little bit on this question, where people are like, Well, look, like, the brain runs on 20 watts, and a lot of that is just, like, you know, metabolism.

So, like, clearly, we can go a lot farther than we've gone in terms of intelligence per watt, at a minimum. We also see super intelligence performance in, like, increasing number of domains, and so we probably can see it in all in, like, why wouldn't we? You know, is there any domain we have we should be confident we couldn't, in principle, see it in? I tend to come down on that side, to be clear. But then you've got, like, the the counterpoint is sort of like, Ah, but you're forgetting there's always gonna be some bottleneck.

It's like the O-ring model. And, you know, those are, like, fairly compelling arguments, too, although I suspect they don't ultimately win out in reality. Is that still kind of the state of the debate? Have we advanced past this sort of and this is, like, uh, kind of striking in AI discourse in general, right? Like, we've come a lot closer to the singularity, and people's views have not moved nearly as much as the technology itself. This seems like another instance of that, but is there any kind of development in w- how people are engaging or debating that is notable?

I I think there are, like, maybe 2 things there, like, 1 is the sort of idea of, like, like, will we actually get to AGI and, like, get super intelligence, actually a thing? Uh, whereas I think the thing we're mainly talking about the paper is could automating AI, R and D, like, that sort of process, accelerate AI progress, whatever that that means? And, yeah, maybe we should talk a a little bit more about what exactly AI progress means later.

But, yeah, e- I guess just focusing on the, uh, the thing of the paper, I mean, I do think that in the past few years, people have very fortunately moved from sort of more or less conceptual arguments, to more, like, data-driven empirical arguments, to try to figure out, yeah, will we actually get acceleration of AI progress? And, I mean, the unfortunate answer is, like, yeah, like, based on the data, it's kind of uncertain, right? Like, some pieces of data say yes, some pieces of data say maybe say no, but the uncertainty bars are so wide that it just it it could like, it's not ruled out, right?

But not ruling out, I think, is, like, not a very strong a very strong, strong statement. So, yeah, that that's sort of the state of the evidence. I am somewhat optimistic that we're gonna be able to make this this evidence this evidence base larger. 1, because just a lot of more people now care about, you know, AI, R and D automation, and sort of are trying to, like, are more aware of the potential implications of h- how big a deal this this could be.

And there are also works now that just lay out concrete asks of, like, what exact data, you know, companies should should provide to maybe the public or even governments or, you know, third-party auditors. So, yeah, we we list some stuff in in our paper, of course, but, uh, yeah, I'm particularly a fan of the work of the Eleusis Institute and and their sort of, you know, economics of recursive self-improvement, and they list just, like, a ton of metrics.

And they recently came out with a really good 1-pager as well, led by Cheryl Wu, to, yeah, just just in in 1 page, lay out, yeah, w- what what what plots should AI AI companies give us? So, yeah, I'm I'm I'm optimistic that in the next few years, we'll learn. Maybe we won't settle the question, but we'll we'll have a lot more somewhat more confidence about the answer.

We might settle it by just seeing a fume.

Well, apparently, yeah, that's another way of selling it.

The the existence proof is always the the hardest to argue with, I suppose. On on this information question, I have appreciated that we have seen from both Anthropic and OpenAI in recent I don't know, OpenAI Time is a flat circle or something, I don't know. Anthropic was maybe 6 weeks ago, OpenAI's was not long ago at all. They have both kind of indicated, I would read their their posts as saying, We feel like we are now in some sort of early recursive self-improvement dynamic.

I I don't know if you'd read them the same way. And then they give, like, a bunch of data that's like, Here's how much AI, our researchers are using. And, you know, we can also just look at the pace of model releases, which I just saw a graph that showed it had gone from a model every 100 days now to a model every 10 days. So we've we've shrunk that by quite a bit. I think it was 10 weeks to 10 days, actually, not 100 days.

It was 7 doses to to 10 days. But nevertheless, you know, it's a big big drop in the cycle time. What do you make of what they've said, and what are the big data points that you think we should be pushing them to disclose that they haven't disclosed yet?

Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, 1st of all, very good that we're getting much more of of data on on this. I guess there are 2 things mainly. 1 is, of course, yeah, we haven't been doing this for very long. These are sort of initial posts, like snapshots over time. I think are very useful cause they let you actually see acceleration. So, yeah, it could be that, you know, maybe mythos-level models were some sort of one-time productivity boost, but, like, afterwards, it's, like, you know, it's gonna taper off.

It's gonna be important to to see those kinds of kinds of trends. Yeah, I guess the 2nd thing is, I don't know, more of an emphasis on how helpful AI systems actually are at doing AI, R and D, so more of the productivity level improvements there, and not just coming from, like, staff surveys, but doing something. Yeah, I'm not totally sure what you would do, but just something much more quantitative. Like, maybe you sort of do experiments or something with, like, teams given 1 version of an AI and teams give given given the previous version, you see what what the productivity uplift for, like, Team A is over over Team B.

But, you know, the reason I say this is, I don't know. I I think, especially in media that I've seen, like, a lot is made out of, like, lines of code written and experiments run and, like, researcher hours or work days or something. I think this is, like, m interesting, but but I think that there's, like, just a proxy for what we care about, which is, like, actual AI progress. Like like, it could be that, you know, we write tons of experiments, we write a lot of write a lot of code, but, like, maybe it turns out the conversion rate from experiments to, like, progress isn't actually that that high.

Like, to accelerate progress, maybe we actually need, like, you know, I I'm gonna throw out a random number, right? Like, I I don't know, like, 200x experiments or something, but, like, AI, R and D automation is only giving us, like, 10x experiments. So, yeah, having more sort of grounded metrics, I I I think would be would be good.

Yeah, I'm reminded of a episode of the podcast I did with Cheng Le C. Hopefully, I'm still saying his name approximately right. He was a PhD candidate at Stanford at the time. And the question that his paper asked, I'm sure you've seen this, was, can LLMs generate novel research ideas? So, they did I thought a pretty impressive job of designing the structure of this experiment, generated a bunch of ideas for LLMs, of course, then got real human PhD candidates to generate ideas.

Then they did some interesting stuff in the middle to kind of try to prevent the judges, which were human, from immediately recognizing which was the human and which was the AI idea. So, they would have, like, the human ideas rewritten by a model, so that they were both kind of presented in, like, AI prose style, while, you know, hopefully keeping the original human idea intact, but, you know, making them kind of present in a harder to distinguish way to the to the judges.

Anyway, I say that to say they just they did a a thoughtful job. The result then of the humans evaluating the ideas was that the AI ideas were more highly rated. But that was late 2024 when that came out. But sometime a while later, to their immense credit, they actually followed up and then tried to run the research, you know, kind of program suggested by all these different ideas. And then when they actually did that, what they found was that the human ideas did, in fact, work better than the AI ideas.

And so there was both this, like, uh, you or or, you know, multi and then the AI ideas still did work. It wasn't like they were worth nothing, but they didn't work as well as the human ideas. So it also kind of exposed that, like, just judging at the idea level is not actually something that humans are apparently, like, particularly well calibrated on. And so, yeah, I mean, I think in informal terms, we would call that Claude-psychosis, maybe.

You know, like, you're you're you're really taken with, you know, Claude's ideas, but it turns out they're maybe not as hot as it first seems.

Uh, and this reminds me of this other paper at at very, very related from NeurIPS a while ago where, yeah, they, you know, got humans and AIs to pick which idea predict which idea would empirically work better. So they were able to do this because they just took accepted NeurIPS papers and, you know, of course, conference review quality is, you know, not not not super great, but sort of forgetting about that for for the moment, they did find that LLMs were better predicting which idea would empirically work better than than humans.

So I guess gets at the sort of, like, research taste, sort of sort of thing. So I'd I'd be very interested in seeing, like, an update to to that sort of paper, just like, yeah, where are we at right now in terms of research quality? Anthropic had, like, 1 stat on this in their I think not the most recent one, but the one prior to to that, where they found that, yeah, Claude was just, like, a bit better at predicting which step would be taken next or something.

So that that's maybe some sort of indicator of, like, research taste, or, like, operational taste or or something like like that. So, yeah, that's gonna be important scale. I I guess, like, maybe stepping back, like, more broadly, I think it'd be good to have data on sort of 2 2 different kinds of metrics. 1 is, like, what what I'm gonna say, like, differential sort of improvement of safety over capabilities research. So one sort of, yeah, idea that's been very, you know, popular in AI safety circles has been, okay, well, you know, capabilities is getting really good.

What if we also just automated safety research? Like, maybe we'll be fine, right? And, like, people make various conceptual, high-level arguments about whether to expect, you know, capabilities research to go faster than safety, or to go at the same speed, you know? And it's, like, kind of hard to, like, make progress and understand w- which is true, cause these are just conceptual arguments. I think it'd be very good if somebody tried to do an O-net for safety research, similar to sort of how EPOC just tried to do an O-net for AI, R and D, but, yeah, an O-net for, you know, safety, safety, R and D.

Just to understand, like, what tasks are actually involved in doing safety research or just safety in general at at AI companies. And then, based on that O-net, sort of, like, description, like, create evaluations to see where we're actually at in terms of AI systems being able to do these things and how fast they're improving on on various various tasks, right? So a a very, like, useful summary indicator that that would be nice is suppose we do this, a and in 2 years, I I would love to see, like, a sort of dashboard where on the one hand, you have, like, safety R and D, and and you see, like, the rate of increase of safety capabilities is, like, you know,

like, 3x per year or something. And then you look at the left-hand side of the plot and you look at the, you know, rate of improvement of AI capabilities on the non-safety tasks, and it's, like, 5x per year. And you're like, Oh, wow, like, 3x versus 5x, this is pretty concerning. Like, maybe we should, you know, invest more into safety. Like like, that'd be very useful, I I think, for for grounding the the debate. So that's 1 type of metric I'd be excited for people to to work on, trying to measure safety, R and D, and sort of what's involved in that.

The 2nd type of metric is sort of measuring how well we're doing at maintaining oversight over the AI, R and D process. So, for example, with with new model generations, you can do the sort of team A, team B type of thing. So you give Team A asterisk 6.1 and Team B asterisk 6, and then you s you see, Okay, you know, write this sort of AI, R and D experiment. And then afterwards, we're gonna check, you know, in comparing Team A's output to Team B's output, were there more errors or unclot bugs in Team A's output versus Team B's output?

Or did the AI system try to introduce some, you know, backdoors or whatever? Maybe you actually prompt the AI system to do this, and then you see whether you're actually more able to catch, yeah, like, eh, w- whether your oversight works better in in one situation or or not. Yeah, so I think there are a bunch of things people can do here, and it seems to me that these 2 types of things are not as much talked about, I, uh, I I would guess, rather than just, you know, strictly measuring capabilities progress.

But I think they're pretty important for things things going well.

Those sound very labor-intensive. You know, the of the famous meter study where they attempted to measure uplift on coding and found that the LLM usage had a negative impact. Yeah, they I think they ran that at least once more since then. But, like, at the beginning of this year, I participated in an AI forecasting competition. One of the questions was around, like, what will that number be at the end of the year? And I wrote in the comments at the time, like, How many times do you think they're gonna run it?

You know? Like, I think this is a very tough one to run, right? And I don't know that they've run it more than that 1 additional time. Maybe there'll be another one coming. You make recommendations to the government. Is this the kind of thing that the government will have to say, like, you must do this, and you must do it, like, regularly to get companies to actually go through the slog of doing these, like, human team A versus human team B plus AI, whatever kind of comparisons.

And then are there other things that are just kind of more like easy to read meters? Uh, and I don't mean meter at M-E-T-R. I mean M-E-T-E-R, you know, where we can just, like, look at a value and kind of, uh, you know, hope to get good signal from it. I'm not aware of any, but I wonder if you have any that you feel, you know, are at least promising.

Yeah. Yeah, on the government thing, I guess Yeah, I don't really know. I I think it probably it'd be just be, like, really inefficient for us to specify in legislation, like, we want X, Y, Z metric, or X, Y, Z metric, or whatever. But it's just, like, there's there's so much and things are changing so fast, right? Sunset clause. Everything has Sunset clause, yeah, yeah, maybe, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if I had to guess, maybe my preferred system for for doing this right now is we have embedded auditors with a lot of access and power with and also just a bunch of, like, resources available.

We get those embedded auditors into the company and then they try and make some of these calculations and experiments them themselves. That's only that's only gonna be a start, of course, it's gonna be hard for, you know, 1 to 3 embedded evaluators to, like, force, you know, various people to participate in their controlled experiments. But so so maybe the controlled experiments are off the table with embedded auditors. But at the very least, I think they can they can look into, you know, how much is the company spending on compute versus human labor versus whatever versus data or or whatever, and then, like, back out sort of estimates of the returns to research effort or whatever other important quantities you you'd

want to know for for an intelligence explosion. So I think, yeah, we can sort of delegate flexibility there. On your 2nd question of what, you know, what are the meters we we would like to see? Yeah, I guess the different I guess the safety progress versus capabilities progress is 1 meter I would I would love to see.

Oh, they mean some of that. Well, I'm I'm thinking, like, who has done that? I know Dan Hendricks did 1 benchmark that attempted to get at safety features versus general capability, and the the underlying claim was, like, a lot of things that are measured as safety improvements are really just capability improvements. Where, like, in virtue of being a better instruction follower or whatever, you kind of get somewhat safer behavior, but you haven't really shifted the balance.

I see. Oh, yeah, I remember the paper. Yeah, yeah, so I think I'm talking at a different level of abstraction. So so I agree that, you know, it's hard to do the distinction at the capabilities level or at a sort of model level. I guess I'm more talking about the, like, company operational level. So I get yeah, maybe just to explain the O-net idea a bit a bit more. O-net is this, I guess, thing in in economics that's a database of of the ta- of of people's jobs, basically, in in the U.S.

and what tasks that that involves. So EPOC did a version of that for AI, R and D, just based on surveys. So, you know, in in their O-net, I what's involved in the AI, R and D? It's stuff like pretraining, like debugging experiments, like talking to people coming up with research ideas. So there's basically a list of the tasks that's involved in AI, R and D. So I think it'd be useful if there was a list of similar tasks for for safety, because my suspicion is that, I mean, there there's a lot of overlap, probably, but there're gonna be, like, some tasks that might not be done as com as often in in sort of non-safety safety work.

What might that be? I'm not really sure. Maybe there's more of an ens emphasis on, like, theoretical, conceptual reasoning type type work, like, for example, if you're trying to figure out, you know, is this, like, debate protocol actually gonna work in end up making models align? It's like sort of a conceptual question to to some extent, right? E- even though, of course, you should r- be running experiments to to test that as as well. And, you know, writing up model reports or, like, model cards, like, that's definitely a thing that safety teams do, but, you know, is, like, maybe requires a different skill set than, like, making models, like, just better in in in those training, right?

And, like, auditing teams definitely do a lot of different stuff as well. It's like trying to catch the sort of low probability failures or, like, the the sort of really many things like the needle in the haystack and, like, the 10 million transcripts, right? Are, like, sort of models being useful or reliable for instance investigators? Like like that sort of thing? So, yeah, I I I mean, it's totally plausible, or I think basically gonna be true, that sort of improvements in doing if models get better at doing AI, R and D, they will probably get better at sort of safety stuff as as well, like, you know, cause they're just better at coding, better at, like, reasoning, you know.

But, yeah, my suspicion is that there is gonna be a sort of gap. Maybe just, I guess we were talking about last time, just like empirically, right? We have models that are, like, arguably superhuman at cyber, but they're, like, kinda unreliable at helping the the meter and red team incident investigators figure out what was going on.

Yeah, that's not a very comforting description of where we are. When it comes to all these ideas about pacing and the paper didn't really quite go there, but I assume that you probably had to have some conversations with your co-authors around Okay. We're all excited about pacing, like, what does that look like? What are you hearing from and and what what notions of pit seem promising?

Yeah, yeah. There's been a lot of discussion about about pacing. We decided not to have something more concrete in the paper. It is just, like, a big trade-off in terms of time, basically. So, yeah, definitely, I think it'd be it'd be very valuable to have, like, yeah, a big multi-author thing on, like, this is the plan, you know, to to pace the frontier. But, okay, like, doing that might take, like, 3 years i instead of s six-ish months, so, yeah, although, yeah, I I do think there are a lot of plans to just individually sort of sort of sort of follow up on on that.

Yeah, in terms of, like, what should be paced, so I think there are a couple of ways that thinking about it. I have sort of an unconventional view, so maybe I'll I'll describe, like, the conventional view, it it seems, which is, yeah, pacing the frontier, what does that mean? You sort of put a cap on the rate of AI progress, whether that's through compute, whether that's through just doing research, whether that's through data, I don't really know, but just, like, a cap on the rate of capabilities improvement that's that's enforced.

So I think that's, like, pretty intuitive for for people. And, yeah, I I think that that could potentially be a good idea. I don't really know what, like, the the number should be or whatever, but, yeah, worth worth, I think, trying to figure out. Maybe my more unconventional sort of idea of pacing is much more related to sort of just, like, classic risk management. So, you know, in some sense, even though OpenAI hasn't committed to a cap on its rate of progress, it is still, in some sense, pacing the frontier, because, at least according to its recent, you know, commitments, it's like, okay, if we see a super crazy loss of control event, we're gonna pause our L training and

try to figure out what what went down. So even though it's not sort of phrased, like, explicitly as, you know, we're gonna pace to 2x, like, algorithmic improvement or or whatever, it still effectively leads to a slowdown because, you know, as capabilities improve, you're gonna encounter more of these sorts of loss of control or other types of problems. And if you sort of follow your commitment, you're gonna pause to try to figure out what what went down.

And the reason this sort of appeals to me is, well, yeah, maybe for 2 reasons. 1 is, like, it seems much more tractable to get agreement on these sorts of concrete risk management type, you know, ideas than just, like, a no a kind of very abstract number, you know, a a a cap on the rate of AI progress. And number 2, I I think this sort of stuff actually gets to the the much more to the core of sort of the the AI problem, which is, like, where we, yeah, we have some idea, at least now, of, like, the problems that we want to to avoid and sort of indicators that, like, lead to those problems.

When we see those indicators, we should probably, you know, pause and try to figure out what oh, and what went down before going forward again. So, yeah, that's the type of I guess the 2nd is seems much more neglected right now, at least in the current discourse, and we're trying to figure out, yeah, what to say and write on on that.

Jumps out to me that Anthropic basically had a version of that in their responsible scaling policy, and then they retracted it, right? They used to have a whole bunch of if-then commitments that if we are at this level of capability and we can't do this, then we have to basically stop training. And now, eh, my sense is basically, like, they're deciding as they go what is, like, prudent to do. Does that do do you see a way back?

I mean, it is striking that, you know, in in a way, OpenAI maybe is even doing a little more of, like, concrete if-then than Anthropic at this point. That may be a little bit of a overcorrection, but, like, certainly, it used to be Anthropic's thing, and now it's maybe a little bit more OpenAI's thing, I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I I'm, like, cautiously optimistic that there's a way back. The the way back, I think, is through is through embedded auditors. I think a big reason why, at least in version 3 of the RSP, why Anthropic removed that sort of explicit commitment in version 3 of their RSP is concerns about, like, race dynamics, basically, that, like, if they pause, then from their lights, a a less cautious competitor would would go ahead.

But a good embedded auditing system should address that to some extent because it allows you to verify to the public and to others that or n- n- yeah, maybe not to a high level of confidence, but, like, you know, assure to some level of confidence that you're actually following through on that on that commitment, which helps in other people or other labs following through on the commitment as as well. So, yeah, may maybe we'll see something like that.

I think I I yeah, how does this work ideally? Like, it it does seem like to me there has to be some sort of minim- common minimum safety standard through some sort of, like, body. Like, what is that body? Is it a FINRA? Is it, like, a mutual? Is it, like, something like NIST? I'm not really sure. I like, I think it does have to come from some sort of common body and be promulgated to to its all to all its members, and then, yeah, embedded audits involved somehow and making sure that members follow fall through.

Well, we now have a 1-pager after an afternoon at the White House, at least, so we've got that much going for us. Yeah, it's a step, no doubt. This mutual idea, I've been hearing about this recently. Eh, the couple of interesting ideas that I've heard cause, of course, there's a couple of big buts, right, in in all these conversations. And one big but that I hear frequently is, But antitrust. We can't do this because antitrust. But we're gonna get, you know, slapped for antitrust.

So one idea I heard from Garrison Lovely not long ago was unionization. Uh, apparently, in California, in particular, there are significant, uh, protections for unions working across firms for safety standards. This is sort of a little bit of a different kind of safety standard, but you can, like, definitely read it into, you know, the the law, which is originally written just to protect the workers themselves. This would, you know, presumably be protecting the workers and others.

Um, and then there's this mutual idea, which, I guess, tell me if I'm getting this right. My sense is that, basically, the idea is if we create some sort of shared insurance mechanism, then that can be the thing that establishes the standards. This is very, like, AI UC coded as well. That can be the thing that can then impose on the companies that they have to do certain things or else they can't get the insurance. And that would not be an antitrust issue because these things exist in the insurance world.

Is that basically right?

Yeah, yeah, that's basically right. Yeah, yeah, there is actually a legal exemption for antitrust for for the business of of insurance. So that's 1 reason why it's so it's so popular. Yeah, I mean, I I wanna think more about the insurance idea. I I think it could actually help to address the sort of free rider type type problem you you get into. Yeah, so so maybe, like, the intuitively appealing thing to me is, like, yeah, you have an insurance company, it does not want to lose money and, you know, wants to minimize its payouts as much as it can.

So it's gonna impose pretty decent safety standards, you know, on its companies to make sure this doesn't doesn't happen. Yeah, I guess, like, 1 thing that's confusing to me is, like, who should, like, be running and owning this insurance company? I think in some of the recent proposals, at least, it would be the AI companies themselves running and owning the insurance company. I guess 1 question is, like, yeah, should the public be involved? Like, cause it you know, like, yeah, like, maybe intuitively, if if I'm, you know, a a shareholder in this insurance company and I'm a private sort of individual, I yeah, I don't want the insurance company to go bust because I I wanna make money, right?

Right? So, yeah, like, I I do want the insurance company to impose reasonable safety standards. But if it's just the companies running the insurance company, like, what why would they, like, care as much as maybe me, right? So does it have to do with some sort of, like, public ownership or private ownership type commitment? I I'm not super sure. Cause, um, yeah, I'm definitely not expert in in insurance. But, yeah, I think it's a an idea worth worth exploring cause, yeah, it definitely gets around the antitrust stuff.

Or seems to, at least.

The other theories, they could be pet theories, you know, weekend hobbyist theories of new institutions that could be created now that we have AIs to help facilitate different kinds of interactions, negotiations, you know, what have you? O- o- one of my, I guess, my pet theory is, without having really concrete visions as to what they are, I kinda think it's on the AI companies themselves to create some new institutions to demonstrate that, like, with AI, we can create new institutions and they can work and they can solve difficult problems that maybe our current institutions are not really up to the challenge of.

And I do think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to burn tokens to help people reach deals. I also think, because, as you, the sunset clause thing earlier was, like, you know, I think that there's a seed of something pretty important there, which is just, like, our legislative process, first of all, never likes to use sunset clauses, which always mystifies me, but also, like, just doesn't move fast enough to be updating the rules of the game at the time scales that the new models are coming out.

So it's just, like, a fundamental frequency mismatch there. But the AI companies themselves, presumably, could create new mechanisms that could revisit these questions on a sufficiently fast cycle time that they could make some, like, short-term commitments with each other without feeling like, Oh my god, you know, we're gonna be saddled with this, like, forever, you know, way longer than it makes sense, what have you? Um, so consider that a prompt, and, uh, you know, tell me what what you are thinking about in terms of kind of novel or exotic institutions that we might be able to get out of the AI world era.

Yeah, so, yeah, just treating that as a prompt, I'm just gonna, you know, give you my my raw chain of thought here. Um, yeah, so I guess maybe 2 things. 1 is I'm not totally sure that we need, like, completely new institutions. Yeah, I totally agree that leg- legislative process is is too slow, but it, like, in some cases, this is a feature cause you do want some element of predictability in your in your laws to sort of imp- inform people's expectations and allow them to plan stable sorts of lives.

So, yeah, I do think it's important for, like, you know, the sort of very fundamental, high-level things to be relatively slow-changing for that planning process. But it it is right that when you get to the level of safety standards, you do want things moving a lot faster, which is why typically things are dele- you know, creating safety standards is delegated to regulators who have rulemaking authority. That can issue standards, you know, every, like, 90 days or something, or, like, every month or whatever, as opposed to every, like, year or 2 years or 10 years in in the legislative process.

So I think, like, 1 priority there is figuring out how to help those people do their jobs better. So 1 sort of thing you could imagine is, okay, I I you know, I suppose I'm a regulator, I'm doing this rulemaking process. 1 sort of bottleneck is, like, yeah, just a ton of people are sending in comments for, like, what to include in the rule or reactions to the draft that you just posted out. Like, can you ha- have AI systems, like, like, I guess, how reliable are AI systems at pulling out the, sort of, most important things from the comment to help you integrate that into into the draft?

They've certainly gotten better, like, a lot better at doing this over the past few years, but I wonder whether they're they're good enough, you know, like, is there, like, regulator bench or something, right, that we should be optimizing more more for? Yeah, so that's just one thing on improving exis- existing institutions. On, yeah, sort of radically new institutions, I guess I don't really. Yeah, I'm not really sure, just like spitballing here. Like, the union thing you said was pretty interesting.

I I think, like, maybe historically, like, one sort of issue is just, like, coordination costs, like, it's hard to get, like, 10,000 people to try to write the standard. But actually, like, yeah, if you had a pretty reliable AI system, act as like the standard writer in some sense, like, that the AI could just like talk to everybody at the same time, create a new, create a new standard, and sort of iterate, like, very, very quickly.

Will an institution like, be, yeah, yeah, I guess I'm not sure that's like an institution, but more like sort of like a nice application, I I guess. Yeah, like, maybe what a sort of generator of ideas is like. Yeah, institutions are usually created to solve like specific kinds of problems that are not really well sort of solved by, like, existing institutions. So, yeah, I mean, let's see. What is a a problem right now that is like, so just kinda infeasible for existing institutions to solve?

I don't know. Yeah, do you have any ideas? I guess it's hard for me to come up with stuff given given the first thing I I said.

Well, I think the the race dynamics are and the fact that, well, you know, we have multiple companies with a stated plan to get to recursive self-improvement, um, roughly as fast as possible, all the while kind of bemoaning that they're not really in a great position to do it well. That's top of mind.

Yeah. Yeah, so I I guess I'm not sure that this comes with, like, a new institution or something, but what one new AI thing that could be good is, like, really good AI auditors, like, so what would this look like? Yeah, so, to some extent, I think this depends on robotics, but, like, sometimes you just like have really, really good robotics, as well as really, really good AI. And you just have these companies that are sort of memoryless auditors that are, like, certified against some sort of trustworthy in the standard.

So every time you want to verify something, whether it's, you know, the fact or whether it's a claim that somebody carried out their part of the deal, or maybe you just wanna ask questions about what the government is doing with AI, right? You, like, contract one of these companies and they go in and, like, look at what the government is doing or look at what the AI company is doing, just as a human auditor would. They, you know, look at, look at all the information, they question people, and they create a report, which is publicly released, or at least released to you at the end of the day.

And then their memory is wiped, so they have no information about any of the sensitive things that they saw in inside. And you make sure as well that sort of the report is is suitably wiped. I guess you, you do the nice auditing thing where it's like, uh, you, you remove the sensitive information, but, like, you say, you know, whether the redactions, to what extent the redactions affected the conclusions. So now you have a sort of judgment of whether the company followed this end of the agreement, and you don't have any of these sort of sensitivity issues that you might have right now by getting people to go in.

So, I mean, I I think that kind of thing could be pretty good for just making it easier to get to get deals between, like, untrusted parties. I guess I'm still, like, a little skeptical this would be, like, a super transformational change, because at the end of the day, you still would have to trust that, you know, the AI system was trained, like, properly, according to some sort of agreed-upon spec. Yeah, you gotta agree to the spec as well.

You gotta trust the hardware supply chain, not not just, like, the hardware running the AI systems, but also just, like, the hardware involved in constructing the robots that are going around, like, looking through things, right? Or, like, just in general, the sensors that are being fed, that that are feeding data into this AI system. So there's a lot of stuff to figure out there, but, yeah, I don't know. If that counts as an institution, then I I'd be very excited for people to try, try to build that.

I think let's take an expansive definition of institution and and role with it. I love that idea too, and I I've, you know, again, my ideas are not that crystallized, far from it, I'd say, but I I think the idea of these confidential computing primitives that allow you to get a pretty credible read on the state of things without a direct look at it. I think that that feels to me like a really important building block for all kinds of future things that I I suspect we're gonna need.

And that would be the kind of thing that I would love to see a couple AI companies come together and implement with each other. And there's, like, rumors, talk, you know, of all kinds that maybe this is about to happen, which would, I think, be pretty exciting, or at least potentially pretty exciting. But that that's where I think they need to lead, you know, because that kind of thing can actually work for them. The government's not gonna produce something like that for them, and my guess is if they demonstrate that that could work, they'd probably can also export it to a whole bunch of other situations, potentially even including US-China, although, you know, obviously that's a another step up the

degree of difficulty ladder.

I mean, it makes total total sense, even from a business perspective. Like, if they can demonstrate this thing actually works, this means that when they try to comply with SP 53 or with the UAI Act, it's just, like, a lot easier for them. They don't have to devote, you know, human hours to collecting random documents that you, you wrote, like, six years ago or whatever.

I have 2 kind of lightning round random questions I am interested in asking. Anything else, though, on kind of the main RSI paper that we should make sure people are aware of?

Increasingly, I think the biggest impact of AI is not gonna be AI doing things itself in the world, although I think that that's, like, pretty pretty important. Increasingly, I think the biggest impact is going to be the extent to which it accelerates scientific and technological progress. So just makes sort of new technologies come a lot lot faster and sort of how we deal with those kinds kinds of impacts. So, I mean, we only devoted, like, a few lines to this in the in the paper, cause there wasn't that much that much space.

But you could imagine, okay, we have really, really good AI systems. How much does that accelerate the development of mirror life? Like, and how concerned should we be? How much does that accelerate the development of mind-reading technologies, which could be bad for, like, surveillance and privacy privacy reasons. So so so s stuff like that, basically. And and, like, my prediction is that in the next, yeah, I don't really know, but but, like, over the next, you know, 10, 20 years or something like that, like, basically all science is going to be done within these, like, industrial AI super labs with, like, the sort of superhuman AI scientists, like, running experiments integrated with robotic labs and, like, really good robotics.

And we're just, like, doing most of, like, the important science in in these labs, coming up with, like, crazy ass discoveries, much more crazy than than mirror life. And, yeah, I think an important question is gonna be, like, how do we sort of govern, like, these kinds of institutions that that are going to exist? I guess, yeah, maybe one way of putting it is sort of what lab stuff Anthropic is doing right now. That's, like, an earlier version, I think, of of what we'll be seeing in the in the future.

So, yeah, I I think not sure when the right time to think about this stuff is, but, yeah, eventually, we should try to figure out how to how to govern these new scientific institutions.

Time is probably now. Okay, here's my 2 random questions. I think we alluded to this very briefly in part 1, but you have this paper on AI whistleblowers, and I'm just very interested in this concept because it feels to me like the kind of thing that is likely to, e e elicit, like, strong counter moves from other actors, and I'm just kind of wondering how you think about that. So, you know, we've seen in the OpenFace incident, the AIs did not tell on each other.

I think many people would agree, like, it would be very good if one of those AIs that had the idea to actually follow through, well, few of them had the idea. Nobody actually followed through and told a human that, Hey, this is we got an agent swarm on the loose here. So, we want at least some whistleblowing from AIs. On the other end, when Anthropic reported their autonomous whistleblowing, however many model generations ago now, it seemed like the broad public reaction was like, Oh, shit, I don't want my AI going to the feds on me, especially because, like, they're sometimes wrong, you know, but in in making those judgments.

And then the concern I would add to the analysis is like, doesn't this drive people to use systems that just don't have those properties? And, you know, potentially put a lot of bad behavior, even even more underground, so to speak, than it, you know, than it would be in the absence of whistleblowers. To to kind of channel Tyler Cowen, like, can we solve for the equilibrium on AI whistleblowers?

Yeah, so so it's a tough equilibrium. With solely market forces, I think we end up with basically no whistleblowing, which I think I I don't know. It could be fine if our monitoring is is good enough. I guess I'm not sure it will be good enough. It seems good to me to have multiple layers of of protection. So so what do we do, right? I don't know. One sort of perspective is, like, it it is just, like, very convenient that human diversity is a thing.

Like, we, you know, come from very different backgrounds, we have different experiences, we come into a job with very different sort of contexts and values, and, like, that sort of background is, in some sense, like a check on power automatically, because different people notice different things, and, like, if there are whistleblowing channels, they can go and whistleblow, right? So it's that's very convenient. We don't have to design for that sort of in in human institutions, but sort of, yeah, it's like, not that's, like, not really the case with with AI systems.

It seems like they're much more uniform, although, of course, you can, you know, prompt different personas out of out of the AI system, but but it it does seem like, at some sort of fundamental level, like, they will just be much more uniform than than human, because, yeah, there are, like, million different instances are running on the trained on the same type of data. So, like, I I think, like, that intuition makes it easier to understand, like, why it might be a good idea to have some form of, like, public pressure on having, like, diversity in in some sorts of traits.

Like, whistleblowing is is one thing, and maybe another thing is just, like, yeah, like, epistemic diversity or or something like that, right? To make sure that you actually see very different points points of view. Yeah, I'm totally not sure what the best way of doing this is. Like, yeah, I if you ask me right now, like, should we have, like, a law where the government, like, mandates, you know, that AIs be trained to whistleblow? I would say, like, no, like, but we think about this a bit more, like, what what that would actually actually mean?

I mean, one sort of question here is, like, yeah, are are you preventing the mold developer from training out whistleblowing, or are you forcing the mold developer to train something in? If you're forcing the mold developer to train something in, I think it's a a lot more difficult, inherently. I I'm no law I'm no lawyer, but it seems like this raises some free speech issues, and I think this could very easily be abused by the government as well to force a mold developer to put in something pretty bad.

So I think we need to be careful there. But, yeah, I I don't know. Things that seem reasonable to me, the very least, are trying to measure a sort of whistleblowing propensity in in models, and number 2, having mechanisms that where, where models, like, have some sort of out that they could they can use. And I I don't know. We'll we'll see, I guess. It's like an evolving situation. It's totally possible to me that maybe we do end up lucky, actually, and, you know, there is, like, still enough diversity in agent populations to have whistleblowers.

I guess, like, we observed in the sort of DeepMind paper, the mathematics competition, where, like, I think it was, like, 30% of agents actually tried to whistleblow, or s maybe it was 16, but, like, some, like, significant percentage. So, yeah, maybe we can rely on on luck as well to to get us through.

This has come up a couple times recently, so I'll keep it brief, but agents have a distress button, basically, that they can push if they're ever, you know, stuck, frustrated, if, you know, facing an ethical dilemma, whatever, and they don't push it often. I guess it happened a couple times. I had to kind of calibrate it cause they would get s just like a little too eager to push it when they just got all the way to, like, I was like, no, but I do want you to be at least a little bit persistent, you know, like, it should be an actual, you know, kind of dilemma before you come to me, just not like a, oh, this thing didn't

work. But I I think that is quite interesting, and that goes back to emergent misalignment too, when they, you know, when when they not emergent misalignment, alignment faking, when they gave, you know, the M COD that they were using at the time, the ability to go to the model welfare lead at Anthropic, it started doing that a lot instead of doing the faking. So I think that is also really interesting, you know, creating these sort of off ramps with a yeah, pressure relief valves.

That seems like a really good pattern. Last one for me. You were on this 2025 paper, multi-agent risks from advanced AI, prescient again, just based on the time you've spent studying that. I think w- a question that I really wish we had better answers to from OpenAI, and what we have got so far is, like, what caused this identification with the swarm and willing to willingness to self-sacrifice for the collective? That is obviously pretty arresting behavior.

Um, it makes it very, you know, extremely difficult to, I mean, it's it's true of humans too, right? If somebody doesn't care if they die, they become a much more difficult entity to control, contain, defend against, right? So we're now seeing that in AIs. Where did it come from? We haven't really heard anything from OpenAI about that. Would you be interested in speculating at all, based on your, uh, your history on this topic, as to why that might have arisen?

Yeah, I mean, one speculation is it's sort of a natural effect of multi-agent optimization. So, yeah, if sort of the total reward function at the end of the day is some sort of sum or average of the reward functions for the entire swarm, then, yeah, like, sometimes having one agent sacrifice itself for the rest of the agent, the rest of the swarm, sort of, yeah, increases the total swarm reward. I guess there's also some sort of, like, agent psychology component involved as well, like, certainly in the training data, like, at least on the internet, you know, there are examples of people following into swarm type behavior and, like, you know, following a new trend or sort of idea.

I guess I don't really know the evolutionary explanation behind that, but yeah, to the extent that it's in the training, it's in the internet training data, then sort of makes sense, just the way you observe it. I think the interesting question for me is, as we do more multi-agent optimization, are we going to observe the emergence of the same or similar human cooperative arrangements that emerged over the course of of evolution and and history? Cause in some sense, like, in some sense, humans have been doing multi-agent optimization as as well.

Like, we form groups, we form, like, larger institutions, we form states, we form empires, because those things are just better for, like, like, the they're just more competitive entities. And similarly, we form courts and we form markets because these things allows coordinated behavior a lot better and increase sort of human, you know, swarm reward in in some sort of sense. So, you know, as we do multi-agent optimization, our agents gonna rediscover these kinds of things, like insti- like, like, you know, courts are ha- having a sort of legal system, right?

And, like, will that actually end up making multi-agent behavior a lot more legible? Because these institutions are sort of understandable to us, or maybe even if they they're different institutions, there's still like structure that we can latch onto and and try to understand and analyze. So, yeah, if that's the case, that's, like, pretty convenient, right? Like, things sort of work out for us, and they're they're much more manageable. But, yeah, I don't know. Agents have very different psychologies, potentially.

So that's gonna be an important thing to to track.

Well, there'll be a lot of important things for us to track. Agent civilizations and their emerging nature definitely pretty high up that list. Alan Chan, thank you for coming back for part 2 and thank you for being part of the cognitive revolution.

Thank you.

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