Subtitle: Studying actual schemers seems promising but tricky.

One natural way to research scheming is to study AIs that are analogous to schemers. Research studying current AIs that are intended to be analogous to schemers won't yield compelling empirical evidence or allow us to productively study approaches for eliminating scheming, as these AIs aren't very analogous in practice. This difficulty is in part what motivates research that adopts a conservative approach to AI motivations.

(In this post, "scheming" refers to AIs that have undesired longer-run interests that motivate faking alignment and might motivate attempting to subvert our safety measures. See also here, though this definition is somewhat more narrow than how we use scheming here.)

An important possibility is that in the future we might be able to create, catch and study actual schemers before they take over. Right now, AIs are too weak to scheme naturally1, but [...]

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Outline:

(04:51 ) Why we focus on eliminating scheming (and how this relates to the discussion of catching schemers)

(07:10 ) Advantages of studying actual schemers

(09:03 ) How to catch a scheming AI that we can study

(10:38 ) How can we actually end up with a scheming AI?

(12:07 ) How can we catch the scheming AI?

(19:31 ) How useful are different examples of scheming?

(29:30 ) High-level considerations for the relative difficulty and importance of these factors

(31:36 ) How important is analogousness?

(34:27 ) Issues we might face when studying schemers (and what we can do about them)

(34:33 ) Overfitting (and the need for principled approaches)

(36:36 ) Not being able to reliably (re-)catch AIs

(38:04 ) Studying schemers without reliable detection

(42:30 ) Iterating on detection without already having some strategy for reliably catching schemers

(49:45 ) Difficulties obtaining confident non-scheming examples

(57:09 ) Only being able to detect scheming when the AI takes a problematic action

(59:46 ) Schemers might try to sabotage the experiments we run on them

(01:03:58 ) Making schemers (that we can catch)

(01:06:54 ) Getting many AIs to try to catch

(01:08:48 ) Making AIs easier to catch

(01:27:33 ) Prospects for making AIs easier to catch

(01:30:38 ) A high level overview of some techniques for catching AIs

(01:35:05 ) Making scheming more likely

(01:39:21 ) Conclusion

(01:40:52 ) Canary string

The original text contained 17 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

September 19th, 2025

Source:

https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/prospects-for-studying-actual-schemers

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.