AF - Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI developers to slow down or undeploy? by Buck Shlegeris

The Nonlinear Library: Alignment Forum

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Would catching your AIs trying to escape convince AI developers to slow down or undeploy?, published by Buck Shlegeris on August 26, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum.
I often talk to people who think that if frontier models were egregiously misaligned and powerful enough to pose an existential threat, you could get AI developers to slow down or undeploy models by producing evidence of their misalignment. I'm not so sure. As an extreme thought experiment, I'll argue this could be hard even if you caught your AI red-handed trying to escape.
Imagine you're running an AI lab at the point where your AIs are able to automate almost all intellectual labor; the AIs are now mostly being deployed internally to do AI R&D. (If you want a concrete picture here, I'm imagining that there are 10 million parallel instances, running at 10x human speed, working 24/7. See e.g. similar calculations here).
And suppose (as I think is 35% likely) that these models are egregiously misaligned and are actively looking for ways to subvert your safety measures and escape your control.
You caught your AI attempting to backdoor some code that controls access to a security-critical service. You investigated this by running other instances on the inputs they'd see if that backdoored code had actually been deployed; the other AI instances never point out the security flaw, and they often try to exploit that code to escalate their privileges. (See
here for more on this.)
At this point you're almost sure the AI is scheming. So you try to call the US President and they hear you out, and then they go off and call one of your competitors to ask for their take. They say something like this:
It would be extremely costly to shut down all the AI projects. China is racing to catch up and won't stop for this. If you force us to stop deploying our frontier models, they'll outcompete us within a year, and you won't be able to get China to pause without substantial risk of war.
AIs are well known to do weird stuff. It would be irresponsible to assume one instance of anomalous behavior meant AIs were systematically going to act that way. I can put you in touch with top AI experts and they'll back me up.
Even if the AI is indeed doing something systematically funny, we have no evidence that it has the ambition to seize huge amounts of power, and it's not clear that it would be able to. It seems implausible that AIs would do that; there's been no concrete evidence that the AIs are in fact power-hungry.
Maybe our competitor just messed up their alignment, which would make sense because, as we've always told you, they're not very competent (especially compared to us). If they want to shut down, they're welcome to. But it doesn't make sense to penalize us for their shoddy work.
Maybe they're just lying; this could be a doomer scheme to shut down AI, which the doomers have wanted to do for years. The logs they sent you could be complete forgeries. Or for all we know, someone there (with or without leadership approval) intentionally backdoored their RL data to make their model do this. It would be a mistake to take rash action before independent experts confirm that this wasn't somehow rigged.
I'm sympathetic to all of these arguments. The main reason I'd be more freaked out is that I already think egregious misalignment is fairly plausible; if I thought it was very unlikely, I wouldn't change my mind based on one weird observation.
(I think it's pretty plausible that news of the escape attempt wouldn't even make it out of the AI lab: all the above arguments could happen inside the AI lab, between the safety concerned people and people who wanted to push forward.)
Now, I'm not sure I'm right to be so pessimistic here. But I think a lot of misalignment-concerned people take for granted that we'd be okay in this situation, an...