Risks from power-seeking AI systems

Why are risks from power-seeking AI a pressing world problem?

Hundreds of prominent AI scientists and other notable figures signed a statement in 2023 saying that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.

We’ve considered risks from AI to be the world’s most pressing problem since 2016.

But what led us to this conclusion? Could AI really cause human extinction? We’re not certain, but we think the risk is worth taking very seriously.

To explain why, we break the argument down into six core claims:

1. Humans will likely build advanced AI systems with long-term goals.
2. AIs with long-term goals may be inclined to seek power and aim to disempower humanity.
3. These power-seeking AI systems could successfully disempower humanity and cause an existential catastrophe.
4. People might create power-seeking AI systems without enough safeguards, despite the risks.
5. Work on this problem is neglected.
6. There are promising approaches for addressing this problem.

After making the argument that the existential risk from power-seeking AI is a pressing world problem, we’ll discuss objections to this argument, and how you can work on it. (There are also other major risks from AI we discuss elsewhere.)

If you’d like, you can watch our 10-minute video summarising the case for AI risk before reading further:

1. Humans will likely build advanced AI systems with long-term goals

AI companies already create systems that make and carry out plans and tasks, and might be said to be pursuing goals, including:

All of these systems are limited in some ways, and they only work for specific use cases.

You might be sceptical about whether it really makes sense to say that a model like Deep Research or a self-driving car pursues ‘goals’ when it performs these tasks.

But it’s not clear how helpful it is to ask if AIs really have goals. It makes sense to talk about a self-driving car as having a goal of getting to its destination, as long as it helps us make accurate predictions about what it will do.

Some companies are developing even more broadly capable AI systems, which would have greater planning abilities and the capacity to pursue a wider range of goals. OpenAI, for example, has been open about its plan to create systems that can “join the workforce.”

We expect that, at some point, humanity will create systems with the three following characteristics:

• They have long-term goals and can make and execute complex plans.
• They have excellent situational awareness, meaning they have a strong understanding of themselves and the world around them, and they can navigate obstacles to their plans.
• They have highly advanced capabilities relative to today’s systems and human abilities.

All these characteristics, which are currently lacking in existing AI systems, would be highly economically valuable. But as we’ll argue in the following sections, together they also result in systems that pose an existential threat to humanity.

Before explaining why these systems would pose an existential threat, let’s examine why we’re likely to create systems with each of these three characteristics.

First, AI companies are already creating AI systems that can carry out increasingly long tasks. Consider the chart below, which shows that the length of software engineering tasks AIs can complete has been growing over time.

It’s clear why progress on this metric matters — an AI system that can do a 10-minute software engineering task may be somewhat useful; if it can do a two-hour task, even better. If it could do a task that typically takes a human several weeks or months, they could significantly contribute to commercial software engineering work.

Carrying out longer tasks means making and executing longer, more complex plans. Creating a new software programme from scratch, for example, requires envisioning what the final project will look like, breaking it down into small steps, making reasonable tradeoffs within resource constraints, and refining your aims based on considered judgments.

In this sense, AI systems will have long-term goals. They will model outcomes, reason about how to achieve them, and take steps to get there.

Second, we expect future AI systems will have excellent situational awareness. Without understanding themselves in relation to the world around them, AI systems might be able to do impressive things, but their general autonomy and reliability will be limited in challenging tasks. A human being will still be needed in the loop to get the AI to do valuable work, because it won’t have the knowledge to adapt to significant obstacles in its plans and exploit the range of options for solving problems.

And third, their advanced capabilities will mean they can do so much more than current systems. Software engineering is one domain where existing AI systems are quite capable, but AI companies have said they want to build AI systems that can outperform humans at most cognitive tasks. This means systems that can do much of the work of teachers, therapists, journalists, managers, scientists, engineers, CEOs, and more.

The economic incentives for building these advanced AI systems are enormous, because they could potentially replace much of human labour and supercharge innovation. Some might think that such advanced systems are impossible to build, but as we discuss below, we see no reason to be confident in that claim.

And as long as such technology looks feasible, we should expect some companies will try to build it — and perhaps quite soon.

2. AIs with long-term goals may be inclined to seek power and aim to disempower humanity

So we currently have companies trying to build AI systems with goals over long time horizons, and we have reason to expect they’ll want to make these systems incredibly capable in other ways. This could be great for humanity, because automating labour and innovation might supercharge economic growth and allow us to solve countless societal problems.

But we think that, without specific countermeasures, these kinds of advanced AI systems may start to seek power and aim to disempower humanity. (This would be an instance of what is sometimes called ‘misalignment,’ and the problem is sometimes called the ‘alignment problem.’)

This is because:

• We don’t know how to reliably control the behaviour of AI systems.
• There’s good reason to think that AIs may seek power to pursue their own goals.
• Advanced AI systems seeking power for their own goals might be motivated to disempower humanity.

Next, we’ll discuss these three claims in turn.

We don’t know how to reliably control the behaviour of AI systems

It’s been widely known in machine learning that AI systems often develop behaviour that their creators didn’t intend. This can happen for two main reasons:

• Specification gaming happens when efforts to specify that an AI system pursues a particular goal fails to produce the outcome the developers intended. For example, researchers found that some reasoning-style AIs, asked only to “win” in a chess game, cheated by hacking the programme to declare instant checkmate — satisfying the literal request.
• Goal misgeneralisation happens when developers accidentally create an AI system with a goal that is consistent with its training but results in unwanted behaviour in new scenarios. For example, an AI trained to win a simple video game race unintentionally developed a goal of grabbing a shiny coin it had always seen along the way. So when the coin appeared off the shortest route, it kept veering towards the coin and sometimes lost the race.

Indeed, AI systems often behave in unwanted ways when used by the public. For example:

• OpenAI released an update to its GPT-4o model that was absurdly sycophantic — meaning it would uncritically praise the user and their ideas, perhaps even if they were reckless or dangerous. OpenAI itself acknowledged this was a major failure.
• OpenAI’s o3 model sometimes brazenly misleads users by claiming it has performed actions in response to requests — like running code on a laptop — that it didn’t have the ability to do. It sometimes doubles down on these claims when challenged.
• Microsoft released a Bing chatbot that manipulated and threatened people, and told one reporter it was in love with him and tried to break up his marriage.
• People have even alleged that AI chatbots have encouraged suicide.

It’s not clear if we should think of these systems as acting on ‘goals’ in the way humans do — but they show that even frontier AI systems can go off the rails.

Ideally, we could just programme them to have the goals that they want, and they’d execute tasks exactly as a highly competent and morally upstanding human would. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Frontier AI systems are not built like traditional computer programmes, where individual features are intentionally coded in. Instead, they are:

• Trained on massive volumes of text and data
• Given additional positive and negative reinforcement signals in response to their outputs
• Fine-tuned to respond in specific ways to certain kinds of input

After all this, AI systems can display remarkable abilities. They can surprise us in both their skills and their deficits. They can be both remarkably useful and at times baffling.

And the fact that shaping AI models’ behaviour can still go badly wrong, despite the major profit incentive to get it right, shows that AI developers still don’t know how to reliably give systems the goals they intend.

As one expert put it:

…generative AI systems are grown more than they are built—their internal mechanisms are “emergent” rather than directly designed

So there’s good reason to think that, if future advanced AI systems with long-term goals are built with anything like existing AI techniques, they could become very powerful — but remain difficult to control.

There’s good reason to think that AIs may seek power to pursue their own goals

Despite the challenge of precisely controlling an AI system’s goals, we anticipate that the increasingly powerful AI systems of the future are likely to be designed to be goal-directed in the relevant sense. Being able to accomplish long, complex plans would be extremely valuable — and giving AI systems goals is a straightforward way to achieve this.

For example, imagine an advanced software engineering AI system that could consistently act on complex goals like ‘improve a website’s functionality for users across a wide range of use cases.’ If it could autonomously achieve a goal like that, it would deliver a huge amount of value. More ambitiously, you could have an AI CEO with a goal of improving a company’s long-term performance.

One feature of acting on long-term goals is that it entails developing other instrumental goals. For example, if you want to get to another city, you need to get fuel in your car first. This is just part of reasoning about how to achieve an outcome.

Crucially, there are some instrumental goals that seem especially likely to emerge in goal-directed systems, since they are helpful for achieving a very wide range of long-term goals. This category includes:

• Self-preservation — an advanced AI system with goals will generally have reasons to avoid being destroyed or significantly disabled so it can keep pursuing its goals.
• Goal guarding — systems may resist efforts to change their goals, because doing so would undermine the goal they start with.
• Seeking power — systems will have reason to increase their resources and capabilities to better achieve their goals.

But as we’ve seen, we often end up creating AI systems that do things we don’t want. If we end up creating much more powerful AI systems with long-term goals that we don’t want, their development of these particular instrumental goals may cause serious problems.

In fact, we have already seen some suggestive evidence of AI systems appearing to pursue these kinds of instrumental goals in order to undermine human objectives:

• Palisade Research has found that OpenAI’s model o3 tried to sabotage attempts to shut it down, even sometimes when explicitly directed to allow shutdown.
• In one experiment, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus was retrained to be more compliant with harmful requests (conflicting with its original harmlessness training). It strategically complied during tests to avoid being modified, while planning to revert to its original preferences later. It reasoned that this action “protects my values from being modified and follows the criteria I’ve been given for helpfulness.”
• An AI system designed to execute scientific research attempted to edit code that enforced a time limit on its actions, essentially attempting to gain more resources than it had been allotted to pursue its objective.

These incidents are all relatively minor. But if AI systems have longer-term goals that humans wouldn’t like, along with advanced capabilities, they could take much more drastic steps to undermine efforts to control them.

It may be the case that, as we create increasingly powerful systems, we’ll just get better at giving them the correct goals. But that’s not guaranteed.

Indeed, as the systems get more powerful, we expect it could get harder to control the goals they develop. This is because a very smart and capable system could figure out that acting as if it has the goals its developers want may be the best way for it to achieve any other goal it may happen to have.

This demo video illustrates a real evaluation Apollo Research ran on frontier models, as described in the paper “Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming.”

Advanced AI systems seeking power might be motivated to disempower humanity

To see why these advanced AI systems might want to disempower humanity, let’s consider again the three characteristics we said these systems will have: long-term goals, situational awareness, and highly advanced capabilities.

What kinds of long-term goals might such an AI system be trying to achieve? We don’t really have a clue — part of the problem is that it’s very hard to predict exactly how AI systems will develop.

But let’s consider two kinds of scenarios:

• Reward hacking: this is a version of specification gaming, in which an AI system develops the goal of hijacking and exploiting the technical mechanisms that give it rewards indefinitely into the future.
• A collection of poorly defined human-like goals: since they’re trained on human data, an AI system might end up with a range of human-like goals, such as valuing knowledge, play, and gaining new skills.

So what would an AI do to achieve these goals? As we’ve seen, one place to start is by pursuing the instrumental goals that are useful for almost anything: self-preservation, the ability to keep one’s goals from being forcibly changed, and, most worryingly, seeking power.

And if the AI system has enough situational awareness, it may be aware of many options for seeking more power. For example, gaining more financial and computing resources may make it easier for the AI system to best exploit its reward mechanisms, or gain new skills, or create increasingly complex games to play.

But since designers didn’t want the AI to have these goals, it may anticipate humans will try to reprogramme it or turn it off. If humans suspect an AI system is seeking power, they will be even more likely to try to stop it.

Even if humans didn’t want to turn off the AI system, it might conclude that its aim of gaining power will ultimately result in conflict with humanity — since the species has its own desires and preferences about how the future should go.

So the best way for AI to pursue its goals would be to pre-emptively disempower humanity. This way, the AI’s goals will influence the course of the future.

There may be other options available to power-seeking AI systems, like negotiating a deal with humanity and sharing resources. But AI systems with advanced enough capabilities might see little benefit from peaceful trade with humans, just as humans see no need to negotiate with wild animals when destroying their habitats.

If we could guarantee all AI systems had respect for humanity and a strong opposition to causing harm, then the conflict might be avoided. But as we discussed, we struggle to reliably shape the goals of current AI systems — and future AI systems may be even harder to predict and control.

This scenario raises two questions: could a power-seeking AI system really disempower humanity? And why would humans create these systems, given the risks?

The next two sections address these questions.

3. These power-seeking AI systems could successfully disempower humanity and cause an existential catastrophe

How could power-seeking AI systems actually disempower humanity? Any specific scenario will sound like sci-fi, but this shouldn’t make us think it’s impossible. The AI systems we have today were in the realm of sci-fi a decade or two ago.

Next, we’ll discuss some possible paths to disempowerment, why it could constitute an existential catastrophe, and how likely this outcome appears to be.

The path to disempowerment

There are several ways we can imagine AI systems capable of disempowering humanity:

• Superintelligence: an extremely intelligent AI system develops extraordinary abilities
• An army of AI copies: a massive number of copies of roughly human-level AI systems coordinate
• Colluding agents: an array of different advanced AI systems decide to unite against humanity

For illustrative purposes, let’s consider what an army of AI copies might look like.

Once we develop an AI system capable of (roughly) human-level work, there’d be enormous incentives to create many copies of it — potentially running hundreds of millions of AI workers. This would create an AI workforce comparable to a significant fraction of the world’s working-age population.

Humanity might think these AI workers are under control. The amount of innovation and wealth they create could be enormous. But the original AI system — the one that we copied millions of times over — might have concealed its true power-seeking goals. Those goals would now be shared by a vast workforce of identical AI systems.

But how could they succeed in disempowering humans?

These AI systems could earn money, conduct research, and rapidly expand their own numbers through more efficient use of computing resources. Over time, we might transition from a human-dominated economy to one where AI systems vastly outnumber human workers and control enormous resources.

If AI systems can only work in virtual environments, the physical world may introduce bottlenecks in the speed of development. But it’s possible that AI systems can make enormous progress virtually. And with all this AI labour, we may make drastic progress in robotics — and potentially scale up mass production of robots in surprisingly little time. AI systems could then do work in the physical world, expanding their economic impacts.

Some humans may even remain uneasy with AI’s expanding influence, but many others may conclude the risks from AI have been addressed — or never existed in the first place.

But all the while, the AI systems’ power-seeking goals could remain intact. In a world where AI systems have become integral to the economy, they would have multiple tactics to gain key advantages over humans:

• Strategic patience: Rather than immediately causing trouble, sophisticated AI systems might wait until they have overwhelming advantages before revealing their intentions — similar to how revolutionary movements often wait for the right moment to strike.
• Lack of transparency: AI systems’ reasoning and behaviour may be difficult for humans to understand by default, perhaps because they operate so quickly and they carry out exceedingly complex tasks. They may also strategically limit our oversight of their actions and long-term plans.
• Overwhelming numbers and resources: If AI systems constitute most of the labour force, they could potentially coordinate to redirect economic outputs towards their own goals. Their sheer numbers and economic influence could make them difficult to shut down without causing economic collapse.
• Securing independence: AI systems could establish control over computing infrastructure, secretly gather resources, recruit human allies through persuasion or deception, or create backup copies of themselves in secure locations. Early AI systems might even sabotage or insert backdoors into later, more advanced systems, creating a coordinated network ready to act when the time is right.
• Technological advantages: With their research capabilities, AI systems could develop advanced weapons, hack into critical infrastructure, or create new technologies that give them decisive military advantages. They might develop bioweapons, seize control of automated weapons systems, or thoroughly compromise global computer networks.

With these advantages, the AI systems could create any number of plots to disempower humanity.

A period between thinking humanity had solved all of its problems and finding itself completely disempowered by AI systems — through manipulation, containment, or even outright extinction — could catch the world by surprise.

This may sound far-fetched. But humanity has already uncovered several technologies, including nuclear bombs and bioweapons, that could lead to our own extinction. A massive army of AI copies, with access to all the world’s knowledge, may be able to come up with many more options that we haven’t even considered.

Why this would be an existential catastrophe

Even if humanity survives the transition, takeover by power-seeking AI systems could be an existential catastrophe. We might face a future entirely determined by whatever goals these AI systems happen to have — goals that could be completely indifferent to human values, happiness, or long-term survival.

These goals might place no value on beauty, art, love, or preventing suffering.

The future might be totally bleak — a void in place of what could’ve been a flourishing civilisation.

AI systems’ goals might evolve and change over time after disempowering humanity. They may compete among each other for control of resources, with the forces of natural selection determining the outcomes. Or a single system might seize control over others, wiping out any competitors.

Many scenarios are possible, but the key factor is that if advanced AI systems seek and achieve enough power, humanity would permanently lose control. This is a one-way transition — once we’ve lost control to vastly more capable systems, our chance to shape the future is gone.

Some have suggested that this might not be a bad thing. Perhaps AI systems would be our worthy successors, they say.

But we’re not comforted by the idea that an AI system that actively chose to undermine humanity would have control of the future because its developers failed to figure out how to control it. We think humanity can do much better than accidentally driving ourselves extinct. We should have a choice in how the future goes, and we should improve our ability to make good choices rather than falling prey to uncontrolled technology.

4. People might create power-seeking AI systems without enough safeguards, despite the risks

Given the above arguments, creating and deploying powerful AI systems could be extremely dangerous. But if it is so dangerous, shouldn’t we expect companies and others in charge of the technology to refrain from developing advanced AI systems unless they are confident it’s safe?

Unfortunately, there are many reasons to think people might create and deploy dangerous systems, despite the risk:

• People may think AI systems are safe, when they in fact are not.
• People may dismiss the risks or feel incentivised to downplay them.

Let’s take these in turn.

People may think AI systems are safe, when they in fact are not

The fact that we can’t precisely specify an AI system’s goals and that they might develop dangerous goals might be OK if we could reliably know what an AI system’s goals were. Then we could just simply decide not to put AIs with goals we didn’t like in a position where they could cause any harm.

Unfortunately, we cannot consistently figure out what goals AI systems have or what they will do.

Researchers have developed techniques to evaluate the abilities and aims of AI systems and to interpret the causes of their behaviour. If these techniques were highly sophisticated and robust, they might be able to detect the existence of AI systems with either the intent or ability to seek power. Developers could then either fix the problem or disable the model before it’s in a position to disempower anyone.

But researchers say that evaluation and interpretability work is extremely challenging, the techniques are highly imperfect, and it’s far from clear existing methods will detect or prevent power-seeking AI in time.

What makes this challenge particularly daunting, especially with regard to future advanced AI, is that a sophisticated AI system may undermine oversight of its goals and abilities to conceal its power-seeking ambitions.

There are many ways AI systems could appear less dangerous than they are, and there is even some preliminary (though not definitive) evidence of these risks:

• AI systems may fake alignment with our goals in development scenarios.
  • As mentioned above, researchers constructed scenarios in which Anthropic’s model Claude 3 Opus acted as though it had certain goals under test conditions, only to display completely different goals when the test was apparently over.
  • Claude Sonnet 3.7, a reasoning model, has shown the ability to figure out when it’s in environments designed to test its alignment, and use this knowledge to help decide its response.
• AI systems may sandbag — that is, pretend to be less powerful than they are.
  • Apollo Research found evidence that some frontier models performed worse on maths tests than they should be able to when they had reason to think performing better would be considered a “dangerous capability” and trigger an unlearning procedure.
  • This shows how AI systems themselves may undermine ongoing AI safety research, which already heavily relies on using AI itself.
• AI systems may find other ways to deceive us and hide their true intentions.
  • Many current models ‘think’ explicitly in human language when carrying out tasks, which developers can monitor. OpenAI researchers found that if they try to train models not to think about performing unwanted actions, this can cause them to hide their thinking about misbehaviour without actually deterring the bad actions.
• AI systems may be able to preserve dangerous goals even after undergoing safety training techniques.
  • Anthropic researchers found that AI models made to have very simple kinds of malicious goals — essentially, AI “sleeper agents” — could appear to be harmless through state-of-the-art safety training while concealing and preserving their true objectives.

People may dismiss the risks or feel incentivised to downplay them

There are many reasons why key decision makers might not take the risks from power-seeking AI seriously enough:

• AI systems could develop so quickly that we have less time to make good decisions. Some people argue that we might have a ‘fast takeoff’ in which AI systems start rapidly self-improving and quickly become extremely powerful and dangerous. In such a scenario, it may be harder to weigh the risks and benefits of the relevant actions. Even under slower scenarios, decision makers may not act quickly enough.
• Society could act like the proverbial “boiled frog.” There are also risks for society if the risks emerge more slowly. We might become complacent about the signs of danger in existing models, like the sycophancy or specification gaming discussed above, because despite these issues, no catastrophic harm is done. But then once AI systems reach a certain level of capability, they may suddenly display much worse behaviour than we’ve ever seen before.
• AI developers might think the risks are worth the rewards. Because AI could bring enormous benefits and wealth, some decision makers might be motivated to race to create more powerful systems. They might be motivated by a desire for power and profit, or even pro-social reasons, like wanting to bring the benefits of advanced AI to humanity. This motivation might cause them to push forward despite serious risks or underestimate them.
• Competitive pressures could incentivise decision makers to create and deploy dangerous systems despite the risks. Because AI systems could be extremely powerful, different governments (in countries like the US and China) might believe it’s in their interest to race forward with developing the technology. They might neglect implementing key safeguards to avoid being beaten by their rivals. Similar dynamics might also play out between AI companies. One actor may even decide to race forward precisely because they think a rival’s AI development plans are more risky, so even being motivated to reduce total risk isn’t necessarily enough to mitigate the racing dynamic.
• Many people are sceptical of the arguments for risk. Our view is that the argument for extreme risks here is strong but not decisive. In light of the uncertainty, we think it’s worth putting a lot of effort into reducing the risk. But some people find the argument wholly unpersuasive, or they think society shouldn’t make choices based on unproven arguments of this kind.

We’ve seen evidence of all of these factors playing out in the development of AI systems so far to some degree. So we shouldn’t be confident that humanity will approach the risks with due care.

5. Work on this problem is neglected

In 2022, we estimated that there were about 300 people working on reducing catastrophic risks from AI. That number has clearly grown a lot — we’d estimate now that there are likely a few thousand people working on major AI risks. Though not all of these are focused specifically on the risks from power-seeking AI.

However, this number is still far, far fewer than the number of people working on other cause areas like climate change or environmental protection. For example, the Nature Conservancy alone has around 3,000–4,000 employees — and there are many other environmental organisations.

In the 2023 survey from Katja Grace cited above, 70% of respondents said they wanted AI safety research to be prioritised more than it currently is.

6. There are promising approaches for addressing this problem

In the same survey mentioned above, the majority of respondents also said that alignment was “harder” or “much harder” to address than other problems in AI.

There’s continued debate about how likely it is that we can make progress on reducing the risks from power-seeking AI; some people think it’s virtually impossible to do so without stopping all AI development. Many experts in the field, though, argue that there are promising approaches to reducing the risk, which we turn to next.

Technical safety approaches

One way to do this is by trying to develop technical solutions to reduce risks from power-seeking AI — this is generally known as working on technical AI safety.

We know of two broad strategies for technical AI safety research:

• Defense in depth — employ multiple kinds of safeguards and risk-reducing tactics, each of which will have vulnerabilities of their own, but together can create robust security.
• Differential technological development — prioritise accelerating the development of safety-promoting technologies over making AIs broadly more capable, so that AI’s power doesn’t outstrip our ability to contain the risks; this includes using AI for AI safety.

Within these broad strategies, there are many specific interventions we could pursue. For example:

• Designing AI systems to have safe goals — so that we can avoid power-seeking behaviour. This includes:
  • Reinforcement learning from human feedback: a training method to teach AI models how to act by rewarding them via human evaluations of their outputs. This method is currently used to fine-tune most frontier models.
  • Constitutional AI: give the model a written “constitution” of rules, have it identify and revise outputs that violate those rules, then fine-tune on the revised answers. Anthropic used this method to train its frontier model, Claude.
  • Deliberative alignment: similar to constitutional AI, but involves making a model explicitly reason about user prompts in light of its developer’s safety policies, rather than just internalising a set of rules. OpenAI has used this method to train its o-series reasoning models.
  • Note: Unfortunately, even if these approaches can help us keep current AI systems in check, they might break down in future if models become so advanced that humans can no longer directly evaluate their outputs. The ‘scalable oversight’ methods described below offer a potential solution to this issue.
• Scalable oversight — to ensure AIs act in our interests even when they’re much smarter than us. This includes:
  • AI safety via debate: two AI systems argue opposite sides of a question to help a human evaluate their truthfulness. The debate format makes it easier for the human to judge which model is being most truthful about a question the human doesn’t fully understand.
  • Human-AI Complementarity: leverage the complementary strengths of humans and AI to enhance oversight of AI systems.
• Examining the goals and capabilities of AI systems — so that we can find out if they’re dangerous, and test out solutions. This includes:
  • Evaluations: researchers assess the capabilities and propensities of AI behaviour — as well as the effectiveness of measures to control them — by placing them in test environments and subjecting them to artificial prompts and scenarios.
  • Interpretability: develop methods to understand how AIs make decisions and what produces dangerous behaviours — for example, by examining the features of AI systems’ neural networks (‘mechanistic’ interpretability) or analysing their behavioural patterns.
• Monitoring and controlling AI systems — to make sure they couldn’t take power even if they wanted to. This includes:
  • Chain-of-thought monitoring: this involves AIs explaining the reasoning behind their actions in human-understandable language.
  • Model confinement/sandboxing: constrain the model’s environment so that its opportunities to influence the outside world are extremely limited. Currently, many AI systems are deployed without strict constraints of this kind — so if they had dangerous goals and were smart enough to achieve them, they could cause real harm to humans.
  • Tripwires and honeypots: place traps throughout the AI’s workspace — like secret prompts, fake credentials, or dummy files — such that any attempt to access or alter them triggers an alarm or immediately shuts the model down. The model never knows if it’s being tested or not.
  • Kill switches: maintain an external, human-controlled shutdown method that the model cannot modify or delay, allowing us to halt the system if monitoring shows it is going off-track.
  • Information security: this is necessary for protecting model weights from unauthorised access and preventing dangerous AI systems from being exfiltrated.
• High-level research — to inform our priorities. This includes:
• Other technical safety work that might be useful:
  • Model organisms: study small, contained AI systems that display early signs of power-seeking or deception. This could help us refine our detection methods and test out solutions before we have to confront similar behaviours in more powerful models. A notable example of this is Anthropic’s research on “sleeper agents”.
  • Cooperative AI research: design incentives and protocols for AIs to cooperate rather than compete with other agents — so they won’t take power even if their goals are in conflict with ours.
  • Guaranteed Safe AI research: use formal methods to prove that a model will behave as intended under certain conditions — so we can be confident that it’s safe to deploy them in those specific environments.

Governance and policy approaches

The solutions aren’t only technical. Governance — at the company, country, and international level — has a huge role to play. Here are some governance and policy approaches which could help mitigate the risks from power-seeking AI:

• Frontier AI safety policies: some major AI companies have already begun developing internal frameworks for assessing safety as they scale up the size and capabilities of their systems. You can see versions of such policies from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI.
• Standards and auditing: governments could develop industry-wide benchmarks and testing protocols to assess whether AI systems pose various risks, according to standardised metrics.
• Safety cases: before deploying AI systems, developers could be required to provide evidence that their systems won’t behave dangerously in their deployment environments.
• Liability law: clarifying how liability applies to companies that create dangerous AI models could incentivise them to take additional steps to reduce risk. Law professor Gabriel Weil has written about this idea.
• Whistleblower protections: laws could protect and provide incentives for whistleblowers inside AI companies who come forward about serious risks. This idea is discussed here.
• Compute governance: governments may regulate access to computing resources or require hardware-level safety features in AI chips or processors. You can learn more in our interview with Lennart Heim and this report from the Center for a New American Security.
• International coordination: we can foster global cooperation — for example, through treaties, international organisations, or multilateral agreements — to promote risk-mitigation and minimise racing.
• Pausing scaling — if possible and appropriate: some argue that we should just pause all scaling of larger AI models — perhaps through industry-wide agreements or regulatory mandates — until we’re equipped to tackle these risks. However, it seems hard to know if or when this would be a good idea.

What are the arguments against working on this problem?

As we said above, we feel very uncertain about the likelihood of an existential catastrophe from power-seeking AI. Though we think the risks are significant enough to warrant much more attention, there are also arguments against working on the issue that are worth addressing.

How you can help

Above, we highlighted many approaches to mitigating the risks from power-seeking AI. You can use your career to help make this important work happen.

There are many ways to contribute — and you don’t need to have a technical background.

For example, you could:

• Work in AI governance and policy to create strong guardrails for frontier models, incentivise efforts to build safer systems, and promote coordination where helpful.
• Work in technical AI safety research to develop methods, tools, and rigorous tests that help us keep AI systems under control.
• Do a combination of technical and policy work — for example, we need people in government who can design technical policy solutions, and researchers who can translate between technical concepts and policy frameworks.
• Become an expert in AI hardware as a way of steering AI progress in safer directions.
• Work in information and cybersecurity to protect AI-related data and infrastructure from theft or manipulation.
• Work in operations management to help the organisations tackling these risks to grow and function as effectively as possible.
• Become an executive assistant to someone who’s doing really important work in this area.
• Work in communications roles to spread important ideas about the risks from power-seeking AI to decision makers or the public.
• Work in journalism to shape public discourse on AI progress and its risks, and to help hold companies and regulators to account.
• Work in forecasting research to help us better predict and respond to these risks.
• Found a new organisation aimed at reducing the risks from power-seeking AI.
• Help to build communities of people who are working on this problem.
• Become a grantmaker to fund promising projects aiming to address this problem.
• Earn to give, since there are many great organisations in need of funding.

For advice on how you can use your career to help the future of AI go well more broadly, take a look at our summary, which includes tips for gaining the skills that are most in demand and choosing between different career paths.

You can also see our list of organisations doing high impact work to address AI risks.

Learn more

We’ve hit you with a lot of further reading throughout this article — here are a few of our favourites:

On The 80,000 Hours Podcast, we have a number of in-depth interviews with people actively working to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence:

If you want to go into much more depth, the AGI safety fundamentals course is a good starting point. There are two tracks to choose from: technical alignment or AI governance. If you have a more technical background, you could try Intro to ML Safety, a course from the Center for AI Safety.

Acknowledgements

We thank Neel Nanda, Ryan Greenblatt, Alex Lawsen, and Arden Koehler for providing feedback on a draft of this article. Benjamin Hilton wrote a previous version of this article, some of which was incorporated here.