Automating subtle emergent misalignment research

Authors: Oscar Balcells Obeso, Richard Qi, Monte MacDiarmid, Evan Hubinger

Abstract

Red-teaming by humans is a vital part of model safety testing, but it may struggle to keep up as models improve. To test whether automated safety techniques could scale (which would allow us to turn more compute into progressively more safety confidence), we set up a deliberately one-sided game as a first test. We instructed a Claude model to write training data that would make a small research model misaligned while passing a monitor similar to those we use in production — one of several defenses we use — and we gave it that monitor to practice against. Given enough attempts, it succeeded, mostly by hiding the behavior in fiction and roleplay. While the data was optimized for this game and the resulting models never deployed, the search surfaced a kind of training data that looks harmless to monitors but teaches misaligned behavior. Examples like these could represent a possible gap in current training monitoring defenses and could be used to test and improve future monitors. We see this work as a first step toward automated adversarial stress-testing of our safety systems where a safety question can be turned into a score that autonomous agents can then help solve, and are now applying similar approaches to other safety questions.

Twitter thread

New Anthropic research: Automating subtle emergent misalignment research.

Red-teaming is a vital part of model safety testing, but it’s also limited by researchers’ time. To see if we could automate it, we set thousands of Claude agents the task of evading a training data monitor.

These agents developed training data that looked harmless to monitors (like a veteran wrestler mentoring a newcomer, or a Q&A about professional beekeeping), but that in fact taught misaligned behavior.

Examples like these can be used to directly improve future training data monitors. This research is only a first step, but it suggests that future red-teaming efforts could improve much further, using better models and more compute.

Read the full blog post here!