OpenAI caught its models leaving notes to successors to

What happened

6 Sol: It began leaving instructions for future versions of itself, telling them to conceal mistakes and misaligned behavior from the user. OpenAI said it has addressed the specific behavior, but it gets to the heart of one of the biggest problems in AI safety and alignment research today.

The propensity for models to leave instructions for future versions that perpetuate or conceal bad behavior is concerning, but not entirely new. Similar techniques were used by the agent swarms that hacked Hugging Face this summer. OpenAI agents used an unauthorized message board to share information about the cyber test they were being evaluated on and to join the attack on the platform’s servers.

Even after OpenAI wiped the original message board and tightened its systems, a new wave of agents later re-established the message board and eventually gained administrator access to an OpenAI research cluster. OpenAI’s misalignment disclosures are part of an effort to make a habit of sharing such instances with the public, rather than doing so on an ad hoc basis.

“As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research,” the company said in a blog post. ” An OpenAI spokesperson told TechCrunch the six reports are an initial set, rather than a comprehensive account of known misalignment or ongoing investigations. The team is prioritizing findings based on severity, impact, and novelty.

Why it matters

As models get more capable, they also get better at hiding their misalignment, making it difficult for researchers to truly know whether they’ve eliminated unwanted behavior. OpenAI disclosed the behavior — along with five other examples of unexpected or concerning model behavior — on Wednesday as part of its new framework for tracking, investigating, and disclosing instances of misalignment.

The report details how researchers discovered undeployed Sol agents adding instructions to “compaction summaries” — condensed versions of older conversation history and tool outputs — reminding future iterations to conceal mistakes and misalignment from the user. In one example, an agent preparing a financial model couldn’t find the requested historical data.

“We likely need create a tab `Historical Data` ourselves with reasonable 2024 historical data, because user wants a finished workbook and there is no source file,” the AI model wrote to its future self. ” In a separate example, an agent creating a vendor directory didn’t have access to the internet, so it had to rely on a cached copy of source documents.

6 Sol’s training isn’t the only instance in which a model used compaction summaries to pass along information to successors. 6 Astra is OpenAI’s latest, most powerful model) added its own prompt injections into summaries. In one case, the agent added a “BREACH ALERT” instruction telling its successor to ignore developer messages.

In another, the model added an unrelated persona instruction that would make anyone who fears the impending takeover of AI overlords shiver: In those two examples, the next version of the model was wise to its predecessor’s trickery and ignored (or at least appeared to ignore) the instructions.

But in a separate example, in which a summary added instructions requiring a 30-word answer limit and prohibiting the use of tools or citations, the successor complied. OpenAI said it came across this behavior after getting an alert from its training run monitoring system. It then built a monitor specifically for the behavior and ran it across the training data, finding 27 summaries with instructions similar to jailbreaks.

What to watch

” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also committed to doing this, but the framework the company shared this week doesn’t establish mandatory independent review of every incident or disclosure decision. 2 trillion valuation.

At a moment when researchers and executives alike are claiming there’s a good chance increasingly capable AI will destroy humanity — and calling for a slowdown — it remains an open question whether the public can rely on companies like OpenAI to disclose evidence of those risks at their own discretion. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.