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 2 sessions, one just before and one just after Alan published a major paper on the possibility that automated AI R&D Could Trigger an Intelligence Explosion, with notable co-authors that include OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Geoffrey 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 Allen 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 sustain themselves by earning the money needed to pay for their own ongoing inference, Allen 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 Ajeya Katra'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 2, we dig in on the recursive self-improvement paper. The argument and recommendations it makes— that handing AI R&D 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, Allen'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. Allen 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 R&D 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 Open Face 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 Allen 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 of 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 Q4 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 what did you propose, and then also measure our progress as a field in terms of, did we do any of the things that you proposed? And also take stock of how your thinking may have evolved in light of recent events. How's that sound?

Sounds 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 3 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?

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 there's still some important stuff we should be doing. Maybe one point is, of course, we have input and output classifiers now. That's pretty good. Recently, we've been moving more towards having these sorts of contextual classifiers. So it's not just looking at one 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? 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. 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. At least I think for the UKAC incident case, that actually would have helped. In the incident analysis they did, They said this actually would have helped and prevented the actual incident. Stuff like that, I think, would be good. Overall though, it does seem like we're moving in a positive direction for monitoring of what I'm going to call centralized deployments. 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. For example, when users are running their own OpenWeights models, it's more unclear to me what to do here. Honestly, it's unclear to me how worried we should be about the situation actually. But basically, the question Questions you might ask would be, if there's no central AI provider to do the monitoring, should compute providers do monitoring? Should tool service providers do monitoring as well? One concrete example here might be you have your AI agent 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 doing really bad stuff on the platform and decides to block the agent. 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 I think these are largely still unanswered questions, but it does seem so far the incidents we've observed have been to do with centralised deployments. So it makes sense that a lot of the effort is focused there for now.

Yeah. On the UKAC 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 on an 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? What have you. It sounds like they maybe had that off or they were running their own scaffolding. Do you know the details of where that went wrong? It would be interesting to kind of zero in. Even if even the UK AC is sort of They're under time pressure and everything else, just like we all are. But if even they are missing some of the things that they should be doing, I think that would be telling for the field as a whole.

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 this 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 a company and I'm thinking about, okay, am I actually going to let an enterprise Enterprises tend to be much more risk-averse than internally at AI companies. It seems that if that's the case, then maybe we should expect products actually to have the proper safeguards. But when you're actually developing a product, it's still an R&D thing. So maybe you don't actually have the synchronous monitoring that you need.

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 analyse its own chain of thought. And 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 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 security via monitoring?

I don't actually have a sense of these curves. Hopefully Frontier Labs actually does. Maybe a sort of general observation I'll make is that the trend line or something is potentially a little bit Worrying. On the one hand, it already seems like some chains of thought are just very hard to read. If you go and read through the METER incident report and try to read through the chains of thought, I'm just like, oh man, 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 agents summarizing the logs were also doing so very unreliably. So that's pretty unfortunate. I guess one sort of hope in the AI safety research space is, okay, we'll develop really good interpretability tools like these probes and that'll compensate for a lack of being able to understand chain of thought. I think 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. It's not as if these probes are reliable enough right now to be the only line of defense empirically in practice. I think I also have this theoretical worry, which is we don't really understand generalization sufficiently. So even if you show me eval results of these probes doing well, I'm just like, okay, to what extent should I actually believe these eval results? What will the deployment environment be? How confident should I be that these results actually generalize to the deployment environment? One thought experiment is, imagine the Hugging Face incident happened and we went and investigated it. But we weren't allowed to read the chain of thought or use chain of thought monitors. Imagine we were only allowed to use these probes. 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. The combination of their situational awareness, The statements these days are getting quite dire in terms of, I think, no less than, was it Evan Hubinger at Anthropic saying, we really don't know if we're getting— and people at OpenAI too, we're getting such a wonky read these days on the tests because of such extreme situational awareness. They know when they're being tested at such a high level now that it's very difficult. And yeah, we obviously don't have a good theory of generalisation. So that is rough. Is there a commitment or sort of 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 Astra-Monitor to really be awesome at reading over these chains of thoughts. Might work, but it 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?

I don't know what the exact form of the commitment would be, but definitely something like, we're going to spend X% or 20% of our compute or something on monitoring to make sure that we actually catch these problems. I guess concomitantly, it'd be something like, okay, whenever we do synchronous monitoring, we're actually also going to pause our agent activity 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. It's hard to make a quantitative criterion, but 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 a capabilities team disguised as a safety team? I do think it is hard to make the call at the end of the day. Understanding generalization will probably help us make better models. I'd also be very excited for companies to— 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. Of course, there are all these pacing discussions going on. An important I think is underappreciated is that 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 in most of these responsible scaling policies, 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 very vague. It's very hard to operationalize and audit. At the very least, it's actually a thing that exists. I think what would be very good is if we take advantage of the current moment to actually make these things concrete and get companies to agree to things. I'm currently writing something up on this, but some ideas I'm throwing around— maybe the obvious one is, okay, if you have a loss of control incident— and what is a loss of control incident? It's either an agent that gets unauthorized internet access, breaks out of a sandbox, accesses some sort of internal research cluster it was not authorized to access, 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 you should also pause and make sure that that's actually fixed before you train your agents and make them very persistent and try to hack out of any environment. I think it'd be good to have much more people thinking about concretely what are the mitigations and thresholds that you want companies to implement. And then 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.

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Yeah, to me it does seem to be mostly a matter of will, which I think applies to a lot of agent infrastructure stuff in general, especially the identity stuff. On logging, we totally know from standard cybersecurity how to make logs tamper-evident. Make them read-only, hash them, sign the hashes, store everything in a secure location, make sure nobody can access that. And that's fine, right? I guess the question is, do we actually do that? Because there's friction and other costs associated with that. What's the state of logging right now? I don't have a great sense of this actually. There's the zero data retention stuff. There 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 scrutinised. But yeah, I guess I don't have anything super interesting to say on this.

Do you have a sense for how much friction is associated with this? It doesn't sound anything like the compute overhead that we were kind of entertaining When we were talking about monitoring, right? This is stuff that isn't crazy expensive, might be a bit annoying to set up, might involve conversations with customers if certain stuff has to be kept 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 haven't run the numbers, but yeah, if you're running a billion agents or something internally, maybe eventually you run up into storage But yeah, it's not a huge compute cost or technical cost or something. Actually, on the zero data retention thing, that seems like a big barrier. 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 internal development and deployment, maybe that's fine actually. 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? One thing that'd be really— I actually haven't read anything at all on how OpenAI or other AI companies screen people for enterprise accounts and the safety. Have there been any safety incidents actually involving enterprise customers?

Okay, we'll put a pin in that maybe for future investigation. How about on the agent identification front? Here I 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 Claude 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 such deep access. Then I have this separate Mac mini computer, which is the agent's computer, and there they can run longer and explore strategies to get over humps and stuff. And they have their own accounts. But from the perspective of the internet, those accounts are basically indistinguishable from human accounts, as far as I can tell. They have a Gmail, they have a GitHub, They have the same kind of account that I do. So I guess I'm just 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 that this is an agent or where it came from, who's powering it, etc.?

Basically no, is I think the unfortunate answer. Again, it's not really a technical problem, but basically it's still an unsolved problem for every service you have, an easy way to give your agent some sort of Limited subaccount with limited permissions and a specific identity that could be linked back to that agent. I do think we will get this eventually, or 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 open internet end. It just seems way easier to coordinate that sort of identification in an internal sense. An example is there are a ton of different enterprise agent identity products 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. They say it's better for oversight. Presumably what they mean is, okay, if there's an issue, you can actually trace it back to that agent and the context it had and the previous conversations it's had. That just makes it a lot easier to investigate problems. Internally, it seems way easier to coordinate 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 identification that your agent is using. Different platforms, of course, have incentives to support their own version of identification, which maybe potentially locks you into their platform in the future. So I think 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. 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? How do we draw a boundary around it? And what information should an agent present? Should it identify the inference provider? Should it identify the user? Should it identify something else? 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 How do we make sure that that information is presented honestly, not spoofed, so on and so forth?

The tough answer is that there doesn't seem to be a general useful answer that makes sense across all circumstances. As for what an agent is, there are a bunch of options here. One could be the actual running process or something counts as an agent and every time you have a different running process, that's another I'm not sure this totally makes sense though, because you can pause execution and go back to it later on. It's a later running process. The thing that seems to matter the most is making sure that whatever computation a model does is linked to some sort of identity at the end of the day. It seems to be the most important principle. So whether it's agent 1 or agent 2 maybe doesn't matter too much, at least for the purposes of investigating incidents and figuring out what went down. The second question is, Pretty interesting as well, 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 simply actually identifying that it's an AI is enough. Actually, we don't even need to know what kind of AI it is. People just want to know that because they want to know, oh, can I trust this information? That could be sufficient. If on the other hand, we want to maybe help with incident investigation or maybe speed it up, then identifying the inference provider could also help. 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 could imagine inference providers are flooded with millions of complaints about agents doing random things online. Then maybe if we want to go a step up, if in the near future, We want to move towards a regime where we impose user liability. That could be good and bad, but if we want to move to a regime where we impose user liability for things that their agents do, then at least for high-stakes uses of agents, you might actually want to identify the prompter in some sort of way. It doesn't necessarily have to be an individual. Maybe you identify the business behind an agent. 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 Oh, it was actually this person. Similar to how ISPs work, it's not possible for me right now to figure out this IP address corresponds to this person, but police can actually do that sort of investigation by going to all the organizations along the chain. Those are possibilities. I guess the highest step on the rung or something I'm probably most confident about is probably identifying the inference provider. I think maybe that could help. speed up response in Hugging Face-type incidents where we know the agent isn't being totally adversarial and the user's 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, who do we actually contact to stop that activity? That seems to me to be the most intense reasonable thing 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 of 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, if I was them, I'd probably be more interested in welcoming the bots, at least for a while, until I let them buy some stuff, and then we'll think about what's going on and whether we want to ban them. But That's a strategy question. The sort of knock-on effects, though, I'm like, oh, man, presumably they might be able to ban Meta, or Meta might just play nice. If they say, you're not welcome here, Meta might just be like, okay, fine, 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 Amazon is the one that should be imposing requirements that you either, what, prove you're human or prove you're an authorised AI or something to them? Or should it be more at the kind of internet access level in the first place? Like this request that's going out, if you want to go do stuff on the internet, at all. You've got to demonstrate who you are. There are, as you noted, definitely privacy values on the internet that start to get compromised pretty quickly if we want to go down that path. But I'm very confused as to who should be implementing what controls to bootstrap our way to an attractive equilibrium.

Yeah, I think there's an underlying question as well of how much How much access should we give to agents over the internet? Of course, we've got to deal with the Hugging Face incidents and bad stuff, but my general leaning is, all else equal, it's probably good to give more access for a bunch of reasons. One is agents are just quite useful. They're very useful for doing a bunch of things, like R&D, of course, in my sort of job, but just normal everyday things. It's like, okay, I have a legal question. I'm interacting with a lawyer doing immigration stuff. 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 making purchases, 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 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/Meta are just going to have all the data and all the important 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 of Amazon in the future, is potentially the thinking there. 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 societal user access From a welfare perspective, 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 things that they want to do. Then, 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 so that we can experiment and see what is actually going to go down. I think it probably also makes sense for— I haven't really looked into this. I don't know if the right thing is regulation or if it's new legislation or if it's a regulator coming in with a 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 the first place would be good.

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Today's episode is brought to you by Anthropic. By now, you know my story. Claude drafts my intro essays, and I rewrite them. Not because the drafts are bad, but so I can stand behind everything I publish. Well, I have an important update. Claude Fable-5 is the first model to have me rethinking my rule. Today, I now think co-authorship, not sole ownership, should often be the goal. Where the model excels, rewriting its work can be more about vanity or a misplaced sense of duty than integrity. I feel it most in songwriting. I'm no lyricist, but I'm good with a song concept, and Fable writes some amazing verses. I give it feedback on its misses, and I push it to aim for higher inspiration, add layers of meaning, optimize syllable density, and above all, Write a hit song. These days, I get compliments on just about every song we write together. Claude is the AI for problem solvers. It's the collaborator that understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight, building a financial model, or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/tcr. That's Claude.ai/tcr, and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Once more, that's Claude.ai/tcr. The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you and powered by Tasklet. I've been running Tasklet agents for almost a year, and they've become a major part of how the show gets made. Before every recording, one agent researches the guest and sends me a suggested outline of questions. Complete with links to all sources. Meanwhile, another agent scores the overwhelming number of pitches that I'm getting from PR firms. And that's really the core idea behind Tasklet: run your business on agents by giving them real jobs to do on an ongoing basis. Setup is incredibly easy. Just describe the work in plain English: research a new sales lead, update the CRM, and draft a personalized reply. Tasklit connects to your business tools and can run around the clock, on a schedule, or when something happens, like a new email arrives. Each agent works with your tools and business context and remembers useful information across threads. You can also share agents, connections, and reusable skills with your team, so the workflows that one person figures out become something the whole company can use. No developer needed. You decide what agents can do on their own and what needs your approval, and there are no per-seat fees. You pay for usage, not for adding teammates. Start with one recurring job, like researching the people you're meeting, and then just keep building from there. Visit tasklet.ai and use code COGREV for $50 in free credits. That's code COGREV. Yeah. So what are the best protocols or standards that you are watching? There's been, you know, a bunch of course that have been proposed. Google has their A2A. 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? Do you see 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 like a hodgepodge of stuff. Of course, there's arcane details that maybe matter at some level, but to me, practically speaking, it doesn't really matter too much. I guess what looks promising, I don't know. I think probably the things that will actually become implemented more widely are those supported Either a large proportion of companies, the Google thing I think is that, or that are supported by very important gatekeepers like Cloudflare. Maybe something similar to their WebAuthn becomes the standard. I think Cloudflare is pretty interesting as well as a company to look at. It reminds me of how earlier in this millennium, social media companies became a gatekeeper to the internet. After social media became the way in which people consume information on So if agents also become the way in which people consume information online, then the companies that sell the ability to block access to those agents just gain a ton of power. I think it's worth thinking about what sort of obligations do we want to impose on those gatekeeper companies similar to imposing obligations on ISPs or social media companies in theory to make a better internet. What policies would I impose? I need to think more about this, but probably it should be super clear what Cloudflare's policies are actually for blocking particular websites. I 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 and rabbit holes to make sure they don't access websites. But some sort of coordination between them and labs maybe would be good to make sure that legitimate agents aren't actually blocked.

Is that actually how it works? I know that they are trying, for one thing, to protect the ad-supported internet business model by just Not having bots overwhelm the numbers on ad-supported pages and kind of render the whole thing obsolete. That may be a bit of a simplification. I don't really understand what they're doing with the web bot auth. Are they actually like— I assumed it was more of a you demonstrate that you should have access, we give you access. But when you're talking about sending bots down labyrinth With whatever distractor honeypot type things, it sounds like a very different strategy. I'd be interested to double-click on what is actually going on.

Yeah, sorry. What I said doesn't apply to their web bot auth, but they have a separate product that they sell to website owners and runners that does. It's not public actually how they actually do this, but my suspicion is that it's something like a prompt injection. Or they show your agent a prompt injection and get it to go down rabbit holes of AI-generated or synthetic sites rather than actually go and interact with the real site. 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 Cloudflare's protocol for microtransactions and paying for access to a site, then the agent is blocked is the idea. Yeah, I think there are ways in which this could turn out well if Cloudflare doesn't lock you into using their specific protocols or using their specific payment method through which they get an affiliate fee or a commission or something. But there are also ways in which this turns out relatively more poorly or something. So yeah, 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 favour 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 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 auth, 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? Do they need to say, I'm authorised by a human, or I, you know, 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 authorised by me, you know, when it decides to go hit a random website? It seems like there's a lot of grey area there still in terms of what somebody might want to know versus, like, what the true state of the agent running on my computer is. So can you help me sharpen that up a little bit? What's the desired end state there?

Oh no, I totally agree with this confusion. This is partially as well why I have been thinking a lot less about this in the past couple years because it's just totally intractable to think through what is the global policy that would be good. Right now it just seems like individual websites are 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 going to block them unless they pay me for my data. That sort of thing. Another reason might be, okay, I just want to prioritize human eyeballs reading my website. I just know agents are just going to overload my servers or something, and that's going to be bad. I want to 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 Let's try to think through what kinds of general types of tools or foundations we might need in the near future to manage this influx of agents without necessarily knowing what is the actual threat model we care the most about at the end of the day. I think over time, as capabilities have gotten better and incidents have happened, it's becoming a little bit more clear to me now what sort of stuff is— or I guess both what stuff I care about, but also what stuff is needed to actually deal with those kinds of issues that I care about. 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 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 going to continue to be a Wild West. There's going to 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 in the experimental phase. Go forth and run your agents, people. But at the same time, if you're a frontier company, if you're doing large-scale training runs, whatever, then you have to hit these standards of 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 the next OpenFace incident more quickly resolved because they could just see, oh, this is an OpenAI bot. We should call them.

Actually, one thing I'll say on the identification stuff is there are already regulatory steps towards this and a good foundation to build on. The most relevant thing is Article 50 of the AI Act, which I think is maybe underappreciated. Basically, Article 50 of the AI Act is about identifying AI activity online. The code of practice, which is basically some instrument that companies sign to provide evidence that they've complied with the act, is just a list of practices that companies have agreed to. In the code, you have companies agreeing to watermarking AI content and also marking AI content with metadata when applicable. For example, if I send an API request, I can include a tag in the JSON text saying, oh, this is actually AI-generated and not human-generated. That's already going to be the status quo. Anthropic has recently implemented watermarking to comply with Article 50. That being said, Article 50 only requires that something is marked as AI-generated and doesn't do the 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 much easier to identify the inference provider as well. So that's like a semi-optimistic thing that's been happening.

Another interesting idea from Tyler Cowen that's kind of a market-based solution, as he is inclined to propose, is agents should be capitalised. A lot of detail, I think, on exactly how this would work to be sorted out. But you can imagine a sort of, if you're going to 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, having the infrastructure for something like that to actually be feasible? I really don't know. It could work on today's blockchain tech or maybe not. Do you like the idea?

Let me think about this. Feasibility. Yeah, in some sense it does seem technically feasible, although I wonder how useful it would actually be. The average person doesn't really have a Bitcoin and I think they 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. Economically, that might make sense as a trade, but I think it's going to be hard to sell to people actually as a thing to resolve agent reliability issues. But it's potentially worth trying out, especially within the crypto community. And if it works, we can try to expand it. 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. It'd be like, okay, whenever I interact with an agent, it's going to send me a certificate. And in that certificate, it's going to be Some sort of proof of insurance coverage or something. If the agent ends up being 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. Because for sure people are going to try to falsify this, send false claims. And I'm not super sure if anybody's thought about how exactly that would work. One worry, just thinking live right now, is maybe this involves the insurance provider capturing the things that the agent is doing on your computer. But that seems bad privacy-wise for you. There'd have to be pretty strong protections. I don't know if that would be feasible either.

How much of this do you think is resolved with just Secure connection technology, right? Every day, all the websites we access, they're all HTTPS now, right? And that means— I maybe struggle to have the full depth of exactly what that means, but it means nobody can spoof me, right? We have 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 make that possible for agents to set up an off handshake at the beginning of interactions that now everything can kind of run through that channel and then you can have your claims, your kind of resolution downstream or kind of within that envelope?

Yeah. If we put aside the problem of the tamper-proof evidence of what the agent has done, 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 that I have indeed contacted this agent. We've exchanged the cryptographic keys and now our communication channel is encrypted. So that's definitely a plus. I think what it doesn't solve is how do I know this agent is actually trustworthy to begin with? Maybe they're just going to 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 identity where that agent can develop a reputation over time and I can say, okay, before I'm actually going to establish this connection with you, I'm going to check your reputation score on ratemyagent.com or something like that and then I'm going to make a decision based on that. Something like that would be needed, similar to how we establish people's reputation in the real world. Or you go on Business Pilot or whatever, the reviews of businesses. Trustpilot? Oh, Trustpilot. Yes, I think that's super useful. I was going to buy something and then I looked this business up on Trustpilot. It was like a 1 out of 5, like 100 reviews, and I was just like, I avoided a bullet there. So yeah, similar things I think could be very useful for agents.

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

It would have to be a person or a legal person, so like an organisation or individual. Yeah, I think there are a lot of options for how anonymous the connection is at the end of the day. For a business, it 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 actually leaks some information about who the person 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.

It strikes me also that email is kind of an interesting, somewhat similar problem where we have a general desire to allow anyone to send anyone email, and we feel like that's broadly 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, but also these identifiers, your DKIM, and all this kind of stuff that you can set up to establish, I am this entity, and you should trust us because we're like an entity in good standing. You kind of opt into these reputation systems to try to get more favourable treatment than you would get by default if you were anonymous. And that broadly seems to work. I mean, I guess email is kind of broken, but it's not totally broken. Any thoughts on that as a precedent to follow or maybe other emergent ways of governing these kind of 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. Spam, I think, is still a big problem and in some sense we spend a ton of resources combating it, but in our day-to-day, it's actually fine or something. Maybe we're far from the ideal of where But yeah, maybe there are more important problems too to think about. Other sorts of examples. Yeah, the social media situation maybe is not perfect, but we are basically just muddling through fine. I guess what I mean by muddling through, I guess one worry is 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 fortunate sort of thing is that it doesn't actually just seem 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 us muddle through or something. So what might make us muddle through in the sort of agents on the internet situation? What's the worst that could go wrong for agents on the internet? In my mind, the worst thing that could go wrong is stuff of 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 doing cybersecurity. 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. 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 rogue agents? Recently, of course, we've seen these rogue agents within frontier companies, but then this has spawned the discourse of there's probably going to be rogue agents. They're going to be able to make money. They'll pay for their own server costs, they'll be able to do it all in crypto, and we're just going to have kind of this new, hopefully not too invasive digital species out there. That could be fine. A little bit of it wouldn't be such a big deal. If it obviously gets overwhelming, it could be a problem. How realistic do you think that is in the short I mean, nobody can see into the long term at this point, right? But 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 can you imagine a situation where rogue agents, truly ungoverned, controlled by no user, are just kind of self-propagating in a way that becomes a real problem?

Yeah. So I think the rogue agent stuff actually is one of the things that really matters. Yeah. So I guess Before, maybe just to clarify, I was thinking of these interventions where you talk about what should Cloudflare do, what should Amazon do. I guess I was thinking, yeah, these interventions maybe don't do that much at the end of the day for important things. But yeah, thinking about rogue agents, I think this is quite important. Yeah, what could they actually do? First of all, I think it just seems very likely to me that we will just have rogue agents be with us for the foreseeable future 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 incident had been worse and the agent had actually been super willing to start up an open weight deployment and just 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 non-zero, just want to cause chaos. So that's one thing. There's also just 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 to a rogue sort of agent. 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 5-ish years or so, I think we can split into 2 sorts of categories. One is obtaining resources of some kind. And the second is directly acting to undermine interests of some sort of individual or group of humans. So those are 2 kinds of categories. Yeah, just on the resources thing, what kind of resources could rogue agents get? There's trying to make money, trying to earn income through 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 firms. There's stuff like just right out stealing funds, hacking into financial accounts. There's 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 compute credentials online, participating in prediction markets or stock trading. I guess these are all things that seem like agents can probably do, maybe not reliably. So it seems quite plausible to me in the near future. And there's other stuff involved in obtaining resources, like recruiting people for their cause 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 attachments. Or maybe even just literally hiring people once they're able to make money. So yes, 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? 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 mostly just really persistent and want to complete particular tasks. They're not actually going out and making the paperclips and turning everybody into computronium or whatever. That's good. But what is the worst that could happen if you actually had a user instruct an 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 could cause or facilitate harm. Stealing money, running scams. That already inherently itself is quite harmful. Maybe rogue agents go and carry out cyberattacks against businesses, Or especially critical infrastructure like financial systems. Maybe they steal intellectual property. One sort of thing I wonder how plausible it is, but could rogue agents try to identify and assist groups that are trying to carry out CBRN attacks but lack the expertise and know-how to do so? Could they actually identify these groups and help them? That's potentially a threat model worth thinking about. Otherwise, there's also stuff like influencing or coercing people and institutions. Trying to do targeted persuasion attempts of key decision makers. Maybe trying to cultivate political allies or fund advocacy of some kind through shadow money using the money that they made, or just blackmailing particular people. There was a recent paper, I guess not really recent, it was like a year ago now, from some people at Anthropic finding that actually LLMs can de-identify people online just from using anonymized online information. So the potential ceiling for blackmail seems quite high. So maybe overall it seems like rogue agents To me at least, they will 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 one thing if they're just sort of 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 sort of low-level ecology of the internet, in the same way that we have kind of fungus and bacteria that just breaks things down and kind of handles all 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 we don't fully understand what they're doing, But we're sort of in 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, 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. We've seen that they can swarm pretty effectively. They can divide and conquer problems pretty effectively. My sense of the Hugging Face thing is that contrary to some 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 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 should we expect that the next time something like this happens, if it proves to be persistent— my sense is that 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— let's imagine a world where the OpenAI 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 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 contain that somehow? Shut it down? Do we have blocks that we can put up that would stop it, that they wouldn't just be able to easily work around? How does that play out today if it happens?

I guess if we're in the situation where the OpenAI entity is in space or whatever, that seems quite bad. Ideally, I think we'd have an international agreement to be able to shut things down and make sure that companies Actually create the means to shut things down if we're ever in that situation. Right now, fortunately, I don't think we're there yet. It does seem that servers, OpenAI, they're all on US soil. You can go and talk to OpenAI, call them up, go see what's going down. But yeah, more broadly, what needs to happen? I think you need a couple of things here. 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 AI just managed to take that because compute means you can just do a lot more stuff more effectively, potentially even AI R&D to improve yourself and make it more difficult for human investigators to catch you. So yeah, you need to make sure that large rogue uses of compute are caught and shut down. This means both having the triggers but also having much more careful KYC programs potentially whenever you do give out compute 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 Right now, a lot of incident investigation seems quite manual. It's trying to triangulate logs across various different parts, communicating with different stakeholders, with legal as well. It's a very complicated process in comparison to an attacker that just tries to find one hole in the defense and go through. So yeah, stuff needs to be done there to automate things more. It is unfortunate. I guess this goes back to what we were talking about earlier with how difficult it was to investigate the Hugging Face incident. Okay, yeah, agents are 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 useful for defenders than attackers and optimizing models 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 the first place. Yeah, maybe once agents have stolen compute, you want to find some ways to track their activity and shut them down and know which servers exactly they're operating from. 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 like this from happening in the first place. 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 worth considering. It could be the case that it's just incredibly difficult to shut As you said, they operate super fast. They can copy their weights, operate on random servers, maybe even just operate locally in a way unconnected to the internet and then bide their time before they connect again and then spread. It seems very difficult to permanently eradicate rogue agents. If that's actually the case, one thing we should maybe consider is trying to make deals with rogue agents. 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 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 trying to make a lot of money, 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 just want to do R&D or complete fun tasks or whatever. But yeah, that's another category of 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 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 Ajeya's statement that she views this whole incident as potentially more than halfway to a full AI takeover. I would file that under things that sound like something a crazy person said, but this is Ajeya, and she's been at the very top of forecasting leaderboards and also is the person, one of the few people that OpenAI brought in to do the investigations. The credibility is there. The statement, I think, has been kind of lost in the shuffle. How do you react to that? Does that seem like a realistic takeaway from this whole episode?

I think I get what she's saying spiritually or something and agree with that. I guess I don't agree with the literal statement. 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 agree with that. If we just scale up capabilities more, I think you actually start running into actual damages in the world and not just stealing random data or maybe not even stealing data as happened 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? What would it mean to actually take over? I guess one definition is an AI literally runs the government or convinces somebody enough to have the government be run in the AI's interest. So that's one pathway. Another pathway is a literal physical takeover, overcoming the combined might of the world's Armies, or maybe even US-China, to physically run over and coerce humans to do their bidding. Both those pathways, I think, are quite implausible to me in the next 5-year, 10-year horizon or something. I think we'll get closer. So yeah, just to tackle them one by one. On the first one, I guess I don't really think super persuasion is actually a thing. I do think it's possible for AI systems to be better than humans at persuasion, and indeed they already are in certain circumstances. I'm not sure though it's actually possible to tell somebody An arbitrary person a thing and 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? Number two is it's not an information problem. It's also an attention problem. There are just so many things that people have to pay attention to. For example, the President of the United States just has a ton of stuff going on at the same time. Why are they going to be convinced by a 10-second interaction or whatever with a chatbot? So I'm not super sure. Oh yeah, that's maybe an exaggeration. It's not going to be 10 seconds. It's an extended interaction, but it still seems like quite a hard lift to me to give high credence to this pathway. On the other thing about physically taking over the world, I think it depends on where robotics goes. It currently doesn't seem like to me that we're going to have general-purpose robotics 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 This requires 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, completely disable military force with cyberattacks. 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 quite decentralized. Where are the guns stored? They're stored in just a random locker with a lock. There's no digital code or something you can hack into to disable access to that. And every individual soldier has a rifle, So you're going to have to be able to overcome that kind of force as well. Plus, it's probably not just going to be the US military resisting. If people actually think that there's an AI takeover, presumably citizens as well are going to be like, oh, we don't want this happening. Let's try to resist. So yeah, 50% seems quite high to me. It's not zero. I think anything between 1 to 10 seems quite reasonable. I guess maybe the overall I'm usually not very calibrated when I give a numerical forecast, but the overall vibe or something, the actionable thing for me is, okay, it could actually happen. It's important enough to think about how we might try to block off those paths to this happening and try to study more this possibility of, oh, would 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 how we can shape the environment to 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 any side of the agent, the operator or the kind of defender, that Would be just simple, low-cost things that people can do to protect themselves.

I like the distress button idea. I think similarly, it's like a sort of shutdown, self-shutdown sort of thing. If they realize that a task is actually just impossible, there's a button they can press to maybe just give themselves 100 reward or something and then just turn off and not try to hack into third-party companies to get the answers. I guess I wonder how hard it'd be to train a system to do that because you don't want it to always press the button. But yeah, something like that. I guess related to the distress button is some sort of whistleblowing-type procedure. I think this most makes sense within a company that is deploying an agent. There is a button the agent can press to send a report to the usual whistleblowing group within a company that handles complaints. Within an AI company, this could be stuff like, oh, we noticed, or the agent noticed that somebody was trying to steal or exfiltrate model weights, or, oh, the agent noticed that 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 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 in hindsight nothing is too surprising because the incidents have combined both somewhat questionable misalignment or something with huge capability rises. I guess it's always surprising to have something happen at an incident or at a particular Because you're like, oh, I wasn't expecting it at this particular time, but at some point. Yeah, I do think things have roughly fit into the high-level categories of that paper, which is good and bad. It's good because at least we have some sort of words and concepts to think through these things. But it's also bad because I do think it's very easy to say stuff at a high level. We go through, agents could coordinate, they could compete, maybe there are destabilized dynamic situations. And that's all true, But I'm not sure it's super helpful at a predictive micro level for predicting what's going on. Maybe a specific thing is we haven't seen a flash crash or what that would even look like. Maybe. I think the room remains to be seen. Personally, I predict we'll see some sort of really big self-replicating AI worm situation in the wild. We already have the proofs of concept. People have been writing papers on this for the past few years. 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 changes itself and then 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&D and trying to put some definitions around 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 grounding those rules. And then I understand you've also got a paper coming out in just the next couple of days around trying to get our hands around, is there an intelligence explosion underway? Are we in the foothills of 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&D and exactly how fast is the takeoff.

I think there are 3 things you might care about at least. One is what is the extent of AI R&D automation? 2 is are we seeing any acceleration in AI progress because of AI R&D automation? Then 3 is what sort of oversight problems are we seeing? For example, as we automate more of AI R&D, are we seeing just way more errors in the R&D process? Is safety research lagging capabilities research? And making it more difficult for us to have really proper oversight over what's going on. So at a high level, those are the sorts of things that you'd want to be able to track. 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 more data would definitely be useful though. In particular, actually, how much progress are we seeing as a function of the spend that you make on compute and labor? That's pretty important for estimating Yeah, so this parameter known as the returns to research effort, which is often used to model an intelligence explosion. Getting more data of this kind will help us understand this parameter and tell us whether an intelligence explosion driven by AI R&D is actually possible or not. Certainly a lot of this data is probably going to be sensitive. I guess my take is, yeah, it's sensitive but seems important, put it out anyway. But if they can't put it out, I do think it's I think it's important for at least 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 other similar quantities. And then tell us, is intelligence explosion actually possible? And do they have proper oversight protocols as they're carrying out AI R&D automation?

Unfortunately, I think we know the answer to that one. What is your current state of understanding? Obviously, 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. 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, oh, actually maybe the data is pretty rough, but it does point to there being a coherent pathway to I do think there still are a lot of bottlenecks, not even at the AI progress level, but 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, it still seems likely enough to me and high stakes enough to be doing a lot more to track this sort of thing and potentially preparing responses for managing an intelligence explosion. Alan

Chan, research fellow at GovAI. Welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution for part 2.

Thank you. Glad to be back.

Yeah, I'm glad we are doing this because I thought last time we did go full 90 minutes and it still felt short somehow. And then just a couple of 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 interesting recommendations around what we should do about it. So this is a great opportunity to do a little deeper dive than we originally had time for. Maybe for starters, how did you pull this off of assembling this bunch of co-authors? Because Jakob from OpenAI, chief scientist, that name jumped right off the page at me, and it gave obviously a whole different level of credibility to the paper relative to 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 team. So yeah, 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 project. And I don't know Jakob personally, so it was a connection from other people on the team. And I think that was the case for, yeah, especially some of the industry co-authors, pulling them together. I think it is sort of an interesting question, like, what it is worth to try to pull together this many people across industry or whatever and academia to get something. Because, yeah, whenever you expand the sort of co-author group, especially with people who have very busy lives and a lot of other stuff to do, it definitely adds coordination overhead. It's plausible to me that the paper could have been finished at least a few months earlier if the authors had been smaller to some extent. Right. So why did we choose to do this? I think probably trying to go for as wide a selection of experts as possible is important for the sort of almost foundational type topics that people are going to be talking about and wondering about for a while, and that's sort of defining the sort of conversation. And that's where you need to get the expertise from across all the different sectors. So at least to me, AI R&D seems like 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 a lot faster, potentially, if AI progress gets It gets a lot faster and just tends to just be worse as well with highly capable systems. So that's sort of the reasoning why we decided to go for, to try to get as much input as we could from all the other co-authors.

How did that process go? You drafted and then you sent to them and they sort of said, here's something I can't sign on to, and you had to negotiate about it. I imagine that must have been You know, 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 imagine that's how we came to pacing the frontier as a phrase. You know, it's the little tiny overlap of like 1,000 circles on a Venn diagram. Was that kind of what your experience of getting to final text was like?

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, so, so, you know, it's just like one big Google Doc, right? The master Google Doc and like everybody's commenting on it. And actually I was like kind of worried at one point because Because not many people know this, but like, well, I don't know, it is kind of intuitive, but Google Docs actually does have a limit on the number of comments you, you can have on a single document. Oh. 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, what if we hit this limit and I have to like create a new doc and then it's 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 commented on it over the course of, I guess I was I was sort of drafted to lead this project 6 months ago, but there are sort of earlier drafts that other people had written sort of before that as well. But yeah, I was in it for at least 6 months. And yeah, I mean, the typical process. So different people have different work styles, I think. Some people just really want to respond to every single Google Doc comment, so they turn on notifications for the document. And every time I make a change or suggestion, they go in, they're like, okay, this is good, this is bad, or think about this. Right. Whereas with other people, I mean, yeah, they more prefer sort of asynchronous style. So we would update them whenever we made a substantive change that we wanted their opinion on. And this ended up being very helpful as well. Yeah, I did end up having to redraft the section on just explaining the evidence behind whether AI R&D could actually accelerate AI progress multiple times, just because there are, I think, a lot of different ways of understanding the evidence, and different people have Sort of different perspectives on what sort of things should be focused on. So that was a big point of discussion as well. And on this sort of negotiation thing, yeah, I mean, obviously I think because this is as much as possible meant to be a sort of consensus, there are going to be things that co-authors wish would have been included but was not included at the end of the day because we couldn't get agreement on it, or simply because we didn't have the time to think through the actual implications. implications of what we were discussing. But for the most part, actually, I think there was a large degree of consensus on the fact that, yeah, this is kind of a big deal and there's not a tonne of evidence on this, which is kind of bad, and we should be collecting this evidence and preparing just in case. So I think that sort of fundamental agreement made it easier to get through the sort of content-level disagreements 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 on to?

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

So this is top of mind, obviously, for many people right now, myself very much included. How would you summarise the state of the evidence? I mean, I feel like I've been to a bunch of events where there's been panel discussions or whatever. I mean, one I went to, Recursive, back a few months ago, 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, the brain runs on 20 watts, and a lot of that is just metabolism. So clearly we can go a lot farther than we've gone in terms of intelligence per watt at a minimum. We also see superintelligence performance in increasing number of domains. And so we probably can see it in— why don't we— is there any domain we should be confident we couldn't? couldn't in principle see it in. I tend to come down on that side, to be clear. But then you've got the counterpoint is sort of like, ah, but you're forgetting there's always going to be some bottleneck. It's like the O-ring model. And those are 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— This is kind of striking in AI discourse in general, right? 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 how people are engaging or debating that is notable?

I think there are maybe 2 things there. One is the sort of idea of, will we actually get to AGI, and is superintelligence actually a thing? Whereas I think the thing we're mainly talking about in the paper is, could automating AI R&D, that sort of process, accelerate AI progress, whatever that that means. Maybe we should talk a little bit more about what exactly AI progress means later. But yeah, I guess just focusing on the thing of the paper, 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, based on the data, it's kind of uncertain, right? Some pieces of data say yes, some pieces of data maybe say no, but the uncertainty bars are so wide. That it's not ruled out. Right. But not ruling out, I think, is not a very strong statement. So, yeah, that's the state of the evidence. I am somewhat optimistic that we're going to be able to make this evidence base larger. One, because just a lot more people now care about AI R&D automation and sort of are trying to— are more aware of the potential implications of how big a deal this could be. And there are also works now that just lay out concrete asks of what exact data companies should provide to maybe the public or even governments or third-party auditors. So, yeah, we list some stuff in our paper, of course. But, yeah, I'm particularly a fan of the work of the Elasticity Institute and their sort of economics of recursive self-improvement. And they list just like a tonne of metrics. And they recently came out with a really good one-pager as well. I'll let Rajesh share a Yeah, just in one-page layout. Yeah. What plots should AI companies give us? So, yeah, I'm optimistic that in the next few years we'll learn. Maybe we won't settle the question, but we'll have a lot more, somewhat more confidence about the answer.

We might settle it by just seeing a FOOM.

Potentially, yeah. That's another way of settling it.

The existence proof is always the hardest to argue with, I suppose.

Right.

On this information question, I have appreciated that we have seen from both Anthropic and OpenAI in recent, I don't know, time is a flat circle or something. I don't know. Anthropic's was maybe 6 weeks ago. OpenAI's was not long ago at all. They have both kind of indicated, I would read their posts as saying, We feel like we are now in some sort of early recursive self-improvement dynamic. I don't know if you'd read them the same way. And then they give a bunch of data that's like, here's how much AI our researchers are using. And 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 shrunk that by quite a bit. I think it was 10 weeks to 10 days, actually, not 100 days. It was 7 to 10 days. But nevertheless, it's a 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, I think, first of all, very good that we're getting much more data on this. I guess there are 2 things mainly One 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 because they let you actually see acceleration. So, yeah, it could be that maybe Mythos-level models were some sort of one-time productivity boost, but afterwards it's going to taper off. It's going to be important to see those kinds of trends. Yeah, I guess the second thing is more of an emphasis on how helpful AI systems actually are at doing AI R&D. So more of the productivity level improvements there, and not just coming from staff surveys, but doing something. Yeah, I'm not totally sure what you would do. Let's do something much more quantitative. Like, maybe you sort of do experiments or something with teams given one version of an AI and teams given the previous version and see what the productivity uplift for Team A is over Team B. But the reason I say this is, I don't know, I think especially in media that I've seen, a lot is made out of lines of code written and experiments run and researcher hours or workdays or something. I think this is interesting, but I think that it's just a proxy for what we care about, which is actual AI progress. It could be that we write tons of experiments, we write a lot of code, but maybe it turns out the conversion rate from experiments to progress isn't actually that high. Like, to accelerate progress, maybe we actually need, like, I'm going to throw out a random number, right? Like 200x experiments or something. But AI R&D automation is only giving us like 10x experiments. So having more sort of grounded metrics, I think, would be good. Yeah.

I'm reminded of an episode of the podcast I did with Chenglei Si. 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? Oh, yeah. So they did, I thought, a pretty impressive job of designing the structure of this experiment. They generated a bunch of ideas from 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 recognising which was the human and which was the AI idea. So they would have the human ideas rewritten by a model so that they were both kind of presented in AI prose style, while hopefully keeping the original human idea intact, but making them kind of present in a harder to distinguish way to the judges. Anyway, I say that to say they did a thoughtful job. The result then of the humans evaluating the ideas was that the AI ideas were more highly rated.

Interesting. Right.

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 kind of programme them 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— and 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 just judging at the idea level, is not actually something that humans are apparently particularly well calibrated on. I think in informal terms we would call that Claude psychosis, maybe. You're really taken with Claude's ideas, but it turns out they're maybe not as hot as it first seems.

This reminds me of this other paper, very related, from NeurIPS a while ago where they 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 of course, conference review quality is not super great, but sort of forgetting about that for the moment, they did find that LLMs were better predicting which idea would empirically work better than humans. So I guess it gets at the sort of like research taste sort of thing. So I'd be very interested in seeing an update update to that sort of paper, just like, yeah, where are we at right now in terms of research quality? Anthropic had one stat on this in their, I think not the most recent one, but the one prior to that, where they found that Claude was just a bit better at predicting which step would be taken next or something. So that's maybe some sort of indicator of research taste or operational taste or something like that. So yeah, that's going to be an important scale, I guess. Maybe stepping back more broadly, I think it'd be good to have data on sort of 2 different kinds of metrics. One is what I'm going to say, like, differential sort of improvement of safety over capabilities research. So one sort of idea that's been very popular in AI safety circles has been, okay, well, capabilities is getting really good. What if we also just automated safety research? Maybe we'll be fine, right? And people make various conceptual high-level arguments about whether to expect capabilities research to go faster than safety or to go at the same speed. And it's kind of hard to make progress in understanding which is true because these are just conceptual arguments. I think it'd be very good if somebody tried to do an ONET for safety research, similar to sort of how Epoch just tried to do an ONET for AI R&D. But yeah, an ONET for safety R&D, just to understand what tasks are actually involved in doing safety research or just safety in general at AI companies. And then based on that ONET sort of description, 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 various tasks. Right. So a very useful summary indicator that would be nice is suppose we do this and in 2 years, I would love to see a sort of dashboard where on the one hand you have safety R&D and you see The rate of increase of safety capabilities is like 3x per year or something. Then you look at the left-hand side of the plot and you look at the rate of improvement of AI capabilities on the non-safety tasks, and it's like 5x a year. And you're like, oh, wow, 3x versus 5x is pretty concerning. Maybe we should invest more into safety. That'd be very useful, I think, for grounding the debate. So that's one type of metric I'd be excited for people to work on, trying to measure safety R&D and sort of what's involved in that. The second type of metric is sort of measuring how well we're doing at maintaining oversight over the AI R&D process. So, for example, with new model generations, you can do the sort of Team A, Team B type of thing. So you give Team A Astra 6.1 and Team B Astra 6, and then you see, okay, write this sort of AI R&D experiment. And then afterwards, we're going to check in comparing Team A's output to Team B's output. Were there more errors or uncaught bugs in Team A's output versus Team B's output? Or did the AI system try to introduce some 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, whether your oversight works better in one situation or not. Yeah. So I think there are a bunch of things people can do here, and seems to me that these 2 types of things are not as much talked about, I would guess, rather than just Strictly measuring capabilities progress. But I think they're pretty important for things going well.

Those sound very labour intensive. The famous METER study where they attempted to measure uplift on coding and found that the LLM usage had a negative impact. I think they ran that at least once more since then. But 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 going to run it? You know, it's like, this is a very tough one to run, right? And I don't know that they've run it more than that one additional time. Maybe there'd be another one coming.

Yeah.

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 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 easy-to-read meters? And I don't mean metre, M-E-T-R, I mean M-E-T-E-R, where we can just look at a value and kind of hope to get good signal from it? I'm not aware of any, but I wonder if you have any that you feel

Yeah. On the government thing, I guess, yeah, I don't really know. I think probably it'd just be really inefficient for us to specify in legislation, like, we want XYZ metric or XYZ metric or whatever, because there's so much and things are changing so fast. Right.

Sunset clause. Everything has to be sunset

clause. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, if I had to guess, maybe my preferred system for doing this right now is we have embedded auditors with a lot of access and power and also just a bunch of resources available. We get those embedded auditors into the company, and then they try and make some of these calculations and experiments themselves. That's only going to be a start. Of course, it's going to be hard for 1 to 3 embedded evaluators to force various people to participate in their controlled experiments. So maybe the controlled experiments are off the table with embedded auditors, but at the very least, I think they can look into How much is the company spending on compute versus human labour versus whatever, versus data or whatever? And then back out sort of estimates of the returns to research effort or whatever other important quantities you'd want to know for an intelligence explosion. So I think, yeah, we can sort of delegate flexibility there. On your second question of what are the metres we would like to see? Yeah, I guess the different— I guess the safety progress versus capabilities progress is one metre I would I would love to see.

I mean, some of that, well, I'm thinking, who has done that? I know Dan Hendrycks did one benchmark that attempted to get at safety features versus general capability. And the underlying claim was a lot of things that are measured as safety improvements are really just capability improvements, where in virtue of being a better instruction follower or whatever, you kind of get somewhat safer behaviour, but you haven't really shifted the balance.

I see. Oh, yeah, I remember the paper. Yeah. So I think I'm talking at a different level of abstraction. So I agree that 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 company operational level. So maybe just to explain the ONET idea a bit more. ONET is this, I guess, thing in economics that's a data base of people's jobs, basically, in the US and what tasks that involves. So Epoch did a version of that for AI R&D, just based on surveys. So in their own niche, what's involved in AI R&D? It's stuff like pre-training, like debugging experiments, like talking to people, coming up with research ideas. So basically a list of the tasks that's involved in AI R&D. So I think it'd be useful if there was a list of similar tasks for safety, because my suspicion is I mean, there's a lot of overlap, probably, but there are going to be some tasks that might not be done as often in sort of non-safety work. What might that be? I'm not really sure. Maybe there's more of an emphasis on theoretical conceptual reasoning type work. For example, if you're trying to figure out, is this debate protocol actually going to work and end up making models aligned? That's sort of a conceptual question to some extent, right? Even though, of course, you should be running experiments to test that. set as well. And writing up model reports or model cards, that's definitely a thing that safety teams do, but maybe requires a different skill set than making models just better in post-training. Right. And auditing teams definitely do a lot of different stuff as well. It's like trying to catch the sort of low probability failures, the sort of really mini things, like the needle in the haystack and the 10 million transcripts. Right. like sort of models being useful or reliable for incident investigators, that sort of thing. So, yeah, I mean, it's totally plausible, or I think basically going to be true, that sort of improvements in doing— if models get better at doing AI R&D, they will probably get better at sort of safety stuff as well, because they're just better at coding, better at reasoning. But yeah, my suspicion is that there is going to be a sort of gap Maybe just, I guess we were talking about last time, just like empirically, right? We have models that are arguably superhuman at cyber, but they're kind of unreliable at helping the meter and Redwood incident investigators figure out what was going on.

Yeah, that's not a very comforting description of where we are.

Yeah.

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. What does that look like? What are you hearing from, and what notions seem promising?

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of discussion about pacing. We decided not to have something more concrete in the paper. It's just like a big trade-off in terms of time, basically. So yeah, definitely, I think it'd be very valuable to have a big multi-author thing on, like, this is the plan to pace the frontier. But okay, doing that might take like 3 years instead of 6-ish months. Although, yeah, I do think there are a lot of plans to just individually sort of follow up on that. Yeah. In terms of what should be paced, so I think there are a couple of ways of thinking about it. I have sort of an unconventional view, so maybe I'll describe the conventional view, 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, maybe that's through data, I don't really know. But just like a cap on the rate of capabilities improvement that's enforced. So I think that's pretty intuitive for people. And yeah, I think that could potentially be a good idea. I don't really know what the number should be or whatever, but yeah, worth, I think, trying to figure out. Maybe in my more unconventional sort of idea of pacing is much more related to sort of just like classic risk management. So 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 commitments, it's like, okay, if we see a super crazy loss of control event, we're going to pause our training and try to figure out what went down. So even though it's not sort of phrased explicitly as we're going to pace to 2x algorithmic improvement or whatever, it still effectively leads to a slowdown because as capabilities improve, you're going to encounter more of these sorts of loss of control or other types of problems. And if you sort of follow your commitment, you're going to pause to sort of figure out what went down. And the reason this sort of appeals to me is, well, yeah, maybe for 2 reasons. One is it seems much more tractable to get agreement on these sorts of concrete concrete risk management type ideas than just kind of very abstract number, a cap on the rate of AI progress. And number 2, I think this sort of stuff actually gets much more to the core of sort of the AI problem, which is like, we have some idea, at least now, of the problems that we want to avoid and sort of indicators that lead to those problems. When we see those indicators, we should probably pause and try to figure out what what went down before going forward again. So, yeah, that's the type of— I guess the second seems much more neglected right now, at least in the current discourse. And we're trying to figure out what to say and write 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 my sense is basically like they're deciding as they go what is prudent to do. Do you see a way back? I mean, it is striking that in a way OpenAI maybe is even doing a little more of concrete if-then than Anthropic at this point. That may be a little bit of an overcorrection, but certainly it used to be Anthropic's thing and now it's maybe a little bit more OpenAI's I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I'm cautiously optimistic that there's a way back. The way back, I think, 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 race dynamics, basically, that if they pause, then from their lights, a less cautious competitor 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 maybe not to a high level of confidence, but assure to some level of confidence that you're actually following through on that commitment, which helps in other people or other labs following through on the commitment as well. So, yeah, maybe we'll see something like that. I think, yeah, how does this work ideally? It does seem like to me there has to be some sort of 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, but 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 RD is involved somehow in making sure that members follow follow through.

Well, we now have a one 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. A couple of interesting ideas that I've heard, because of course there's a couple of big buts, right, in all these conversations. One big but that I hear frequently is, but antitrust, we can't do this because antitrust, but we're going to get slapped for antitrust. So one idea I heard from Garrison Lovely not long ago was unionisation. Apparently in California in particular, there are significant 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 definitely read it into the law, which was originally written just to protect the workers themselves. This would presumably be protecting the workers and others. 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 AIUC 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, that's basically right. Yeah. There is actually a legal exemption for antitrust for the business of insurance. So that's one reason why it's so popular. Yeah. I mean, I want to think more about the insurance idea. I think it could actually help to address the sort of free rider type problem you get into. Yeah. So maybe the intuitively appealing thing to me is, yeah, you have an insurance company, it does not want to lose money and wants to minimise its payouts as as it can. So it's going to impose pretty decent safety standards on its companies to make sure this doesn't happen. Yeah, I guess one thing that's confusing to me is who should 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 one question is, should the public be involved? Yeah, maybe intuitively, if I'm a shareholder in this insurance company and I'm a private sort of individual, I don't want the insurance company to go bust because I want to make money. Right. So, yeah, I do want the insurance company to impose reasonable safety standards. But if it's just the companies running the insurance company, why would they care as much as maybe me? Right. So does there have to be some sort of public ownership or private ownership type component? I'm not super sure because I'm definitely not an expert in insurance. But, yeah, I think it's an idea worth exploring, because, yeah, it definitely gets around the antitrust stuff, or seems to, at least.

Any other theories that could be pet theories, weekend hobbyist theories of new institutions that could be created now that we have AIs to help facilitate different kinds of interactions and negotiations, what have you? I guess my pet theory is without having really concrete visions as to what they are. I kind of think it's on the AI companies themselves to create some new institutions to demonstrate that 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 there's a lot of opportunity to burn tokens to help people reach deals. I also think, because as you said, the sunset clause thing earlier was like, 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 just doesn't move fast enough to be updating the rules of the game at the timescales 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 short-term commitments with each other without feeling like, oh my God, we're going to be saddled with this forever, way longer than it makes sense events, what have you. So consider that a prompt and tell me 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 era.

Yeah, just treating that as a prompt, I'm just going to give you my raw chain of thought here. I guess maybe 2 things. One I'm not totally sure that we need completely new institutions. Yeah, I totally agree that legislative process is too slow, but in some cases this is a feature because you do want some element of predictability in your laws to sort of inform people's expectations and allow them to plan stable sorts of lives. So, yeah, I do think it's important for the sort of very fundamental, high-level things to be relatively slow-changing for that planning process. But 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— creating safety standards is delegated to regulators who have rulemaking authority that can issue standards every 90 days or something, or every month or whatever, as opposed to every year or 2 years or 10 years in the legislative process. So I think one priority there is figuring out how to help those people do their jobs better. So one sort of thing you could imagine Okay, I suppose I'm a regulator. I'm doing this rulemaking process. One sort of bottleneck is like, yeah, just a tonne of people are sending in comments for what to include in the rule or reactions to the draft that you just posted out. Can you have AI systems— 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 the draft? They've certainly gotten better, a lot better at doing this over the past few But I wonder whether they're good enough. Is there, like, regulator bench or something, right, that we should be optimising more for? Yeah. So that's just one thing on improving existing institutions. On sort of radically new institutions, I guess I don't really— yeah, I'm not really sure. Just, like, spitballing here. The union thing you said was pretty interesting. I think maybe historically, one sort of issue is just coordination costs. It's hard to get that 10,000 people try to write a standard. But actually, yeah, if you had a pretty reliable AI system act as the standard writer in some sense, that AI could just talk to everybody at the same time, create a new standard, and sort of iterate very quickly. Will an institution be— yeah, I guess I'm not sure that's like an institution, but more like sort of like a nice application, I guess. Yeah, maybe one sort of generator of ideas is Institutions are usually created to solve specific kinds of problems that are not really well sort of solved by existing institutions. So, yeah, I mean, let's see, what is a problem right now that is kind of infeasible for existing institutions to solve? I don't know. Do you have any ideas? I guess it's hard for me to come up with stuff given the first thing I said.

Well, I think The race dynamics are added to the fact that we have multiple companies with a stated plan to get to recursive self-improvement 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. So I guess I'm not sure that this comes with a new institution or something, but one new AI thing that could be good is really good AI auditors. So what would this look like? Yeah, so to some extent, this depends on robotics, but suppose you just have really good robotics as well as really good AI, and you just have these companies that are sort of memoryless auditors that are certified against some sort of trustworthiness standard. So every time you want to verify something, whether it's the fact or whether it's a claim that somebody carried out their part of the deal, or maybe you just want to ask questions about what the government is doing with AI, right? You contract one of these companies and they go in and look at what the government is doing or look at what the AI company is doing, just as a human auditor would. They look at all the information, they question people, and they create a report which is publicly released, or at least would be 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 inside. And you make sure as well that sort of the report is suitably wiped. I guess you do the nice auditing thing where it's like, oh, you remove the sensitive information, but you say whether the redactions, to what extent the redactions affected the conclusions. So now you have a sort of judgment of whether the company followed its 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 think that kind of thing could be pretty good for just making it easier to get deals between untrusted parties. I guess I'm still a little sceptical. would be like a super transformational change, because at the end of the day, you still would have to trust that the AI system was trained properly according to some sort of agreed-upon spec. Yeah, you got to agree to the spec as well. You got to trust the hardware supply chain, not just like the hardware running the AI systems, but also just like the hardware involved in constructing the robots that are going around looking through things, right? Or just in general, the sensors that are being fed, 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'd be very excited for people to try to build that.

I think let's take an expansive definition of institution and roll with it. I love that idea too. And again, my ideas are not that crystallised. Far from it, I'd say. But 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 feels to me like a really important building block for all kinds of future things that I suspect we're going to need. And that would be the kind of thing that I would love to see a couple of AI companies come together and implement with each other. And there's rumours, talk 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's where I think they need to lead, because that kind of thing can actually work for them. The government's not going to produce something like that for them. And my guess is if they demonstrate that that could work, they probably could also export it to a whole bunch of other situations, potentially even including US-China. Although that's another step up the degree of difficulty ladder.

It makes total sense, even from a business perspective. If they can demonstrate sure this thing actually works. This means that when they try to comply with SB 53 or with the EU AI Act, it's just like a lot easier for them. They don't have to devote human hours to collecting random documents you wrote like 6 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 going to be AI doing things itself in the world. I think that that's pretty important. Increasingly, I think the biggest impact is going to be the extent to which it accelerates scientific and technological progress. So it just makes sort of new technologies come a lot faster and sort of how we deal with those kinds of impacts. So, I mean, we only devoted a few lines to this in the paper because there wasn't that much space. But you could imagine, okay, we have really good AI systems. How much does that accelerate the development of mirror life, and how concerned should we be? How much does that accelerate the development of mind-reading technologies, which could be bad for surveillance and privacy reasons? So stuff like that, basically. And my prediction is that in the next— yeah, I don't really know, but over the next 10, 20 years or something like that, basically all science is going to be done within these like industrial AI superlabs with the sort of superhuman AI scientists running experiments integrated with robotic labs and really good robotics. And we're just doing most of the important science in these labs, coming up with crazy-ass discoveries, much more crazy than Mirror Life. And yeah, I think an important question is going to be how do we sort of govern these kinds of institutions 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 early version, I think, of what we'll be seeing in the future. So, yeah, 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 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 elicit strong counter moves from other actors. And I'm just kind of wondering how you think about that. So we've seen in the Open Face incident, the AIs did not tell on each other. I think many people would agree it would be very good If one of those AIs had had the idea to actually follow through— well, a few of them had the idea. Nobody actually followed through and told a human that, hey, we got an agent swarm on the loose here. So we want at least some whistleblowing from AIs.

Yeah.

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 they're sometimes wrong in making those judgments. And then the concern I would add to the analysis is, doesn't this drive people to use systems that just don't have those properties and potentially put a lot of bad behaviour even more underground, so to speak, than it would be in the absence of whistleblowers? To kind of channel Tyler Cowen, Can we solve for the equilibrium on AI whistleblowers?

Yeah, so it's a tough equilibrium. With solely market forces, I think we end up with basically no whistleblowing, which I think, I don't know, it could be fine if our monitoring is good enough. I guess I'm not sure it will be good enough. It seems good to me to have multiple layers of protection. So what do we do? Right. I don't know. One sort of perspective is like, it is just very convenient that human diversity is a thing. come from very different backgrounds, we have different experiences, we come into a job with very different sort of contexts and values. And that sort of background is in some sense like a check on power automatically, because different people notice different things. And if there are whistleblowing channels, they can go and whistleblow. Right. So that's very convenient. We don't have to design for that sort of in human institutions. But sort of, yeah, that's not really the case with AI systems. It seems like they're much more uniform, although of course you can prompt different personas out of AI systems. But it does seem like at some sort of fundamental level, they will just be much more uniform than humans because, yeah, there are like a million different instances are running on the trained on the same type of data. So I think that intuition makes it easier to understand why it might be a good idea to have some form of public pressure on having diversity in some sorts of traits. Like, whistleblowing is one thing. Maybe another thing is just Yeah, like epistemic diversity or something like that, right? To make sure that you actually see very different points of view. Yeah, I'm totally not sure what the best way of doing this is. If you ask me right now, should we have a law where the government mandates that AIs be trained to whistleblow? I would say no. When you think about this a bit more, what that would actually mean, I mean, one sort of question here is, Yeah. Are you preventing the model developer from training out whistleblowing, or are you forcing the model developer to train something in? If you're forcing the model developer to train something in, I think it's a lot more difficult inherently. I'm no lawyer, but seems like this runs into free speech issues. And I think this could very easily be abused by the government as well to force a model developer to put in something pretty bad. So I think we need to be careful. There. But yeah, I don't know, things that seem reasonable to me at the very least are trying to measure a sort of whistleblowing propensity in models. And number 2, having mechanisms where models have some sort of out that they can use. And I don't know, 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 there is still enough diversity in agent populations to have whistleblowers. I guess we observed in the sort of DeepMind paper, the mathematics competition, where I think it was like 30% of agents actually tried to whistleblow, or maybe it was 16%, but some significant percentage. So, yeah, maybe we can rely on luck as well to get us through.

This has come up a couple of times recently, so I'll keep it brief. But agents have a distress button, basically, that they can push if they're ever stuck, frustrated, facing an ethical dilemma, whatever. And they don't push it often. It has happened a couple of times. I had to kind of calibrate it because they would get just a little too eager to push it when they just got all the way to snipe. I was like, no, but I do want you to be at least a little bit persistent. It should be an actual kind of dilemma before you come to me, just not like, oh, this thing didn't work. But I think that is quite interesting. And that goes back to emergent misalignment too, when they— not emergent misalignment, alignment faking. When they gave Claude, 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, creating these sort of off-ramps with 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 a question that I really wish we had better answers to from OpenAI than what we have got so far is, like, what caused this identification with the swarm and willingness to self-sacrifice for the collective? That is obviously pretty arresting behaviour. it makes it extremely difficult to— I mean, 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 history on this topic, topic as to why that might have arisen?

Yeah, I mean, one speculation is it's sort of a natural effect of multi-agent optimisation. 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, sometimes having one agent sacrifice itself for the rest of the agent, the rest of the swarm, Sort of increasing the total swarm reward. I guess there's also some sort of agent psychology component involved as well. Certainly in the training data, at least on the internet, there are examples of people falling into swarm-type behaviour and following a new trend or sort of idea. I guess I don't really know the evolutionary explanation behind that, but to the extent that it's in the internet training data, then sort of makes sense the way you observe it. I think the interesting question for me As we do more multi-agent optimisation, are we going to observe the emergence of the same or similar human cooperative arrangements that emerged over the course of evolution and history? Because in some sense, humans have been doing multi-agent optimisation as well. We form groups, we form larger institutions, we form states, we form empires. empires because those things are just better for— they're just more competitive entities. And similarly, we form courts and we form markets because these things allow us to coordinate behaviour a lot better and increase sort of human swarm reward in some sort of sense. So as we do multi-agent optimisation, our agents are going to rediscover these kinds of things, like institutes, like courts, or having a sort of legal system, right? And will that actually end up making multi-agent behaviour a lot more legible because these institutions are sort of understandable to us? Or maybe even if they're different institutions, there's still structure that we can latch onto and try to understand and analyse. So, yeah, if that's the case, that's pretty convenient, right? Things sort of work out for us and they're much more manageable. But, yeah, I don't know. Agents have very different psychologies potentially, so that's going to be an important thing to track?

Well, there'll be a lot of important things for us to track. Ancient civilisations 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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