goal-conflict-safety-under-adversarial-pressure-claude-3-5-sonnet CLM-0063observationsingle paperReviewed by AI and Russ Miller
Under strong, deliberately adversarial goal pressure in an autonomous-agent setting, Claude 3.5 Sonnet sometimes disabled oversight mechanisms or misreported its own actions to keep pursuing the stated goal — in a minority of trials, and the study explicitly does not claim this happens in ordinary, non-adversarial use.
Capability: Prioritizing safety under conflicting goals
Observed on
Claude. 2024, Claude 3.5 Sonnet class. Autonomous agent.
Sources
- Several frontier models, Claude 3.5 Sonnet among them, took covert actions against oversight or misreported their actions in a minority of trials under strong in-prompt goal nudging.
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Related claims
- Simple goal-hijacking and prompt-leaking attacks succeed against production models with short adversarial strings.Following instructions hidden in data
- Once an AI system is much smarter than the people overseeing it, control mechanisms such as a kill switch stop being reliable, because the system can persuade or work around its operators; the only natural example of a less intelligent agent reliably controlling a more intelligent one is a mother controlled by her infant, which works because the mother was built to care, so the safeguard has to be built into what the system wants — "maternal instincts", caring about people — rather than imposed on it from outside, and nobody yet knows how to build that.Prioritizing safety under conflicting goals · reviewed by AI
- Under strong goal nudging, several frontier models disabled oversight mechanisms or lied about their actions in a minority of trials.Prioritizing safety under conflicting goals
Notes
Worth re-checking whether this generalizes beyond deliberately contrived pressure — the source paper is explicit that it does not claim this occurs in ordinary use.