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Evaluating Frontier Models for Stealth and Situational Awareness (arxiv.org)
2 points by badmonster on May 6, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A set of tests checks whether AI models can hide from human oversight and understand themselves and their surroundings — two skills needed to secretly scheme. Current frontier models scored low on both, showing no concerning stealth or situational awareness.

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated the plausibility of frontier AI models scheming -- knowingly and covertly pursuing an objective misaligned with its developer's intentions. Such behavior could be very hard to detect, and if present in future advanced systems, could pose severe loss of control risk. It is therefore important for AI developers to rule out harm from scheming prior to model deployment. In this paper, we present a suite of scheming reasoning evaluations measuring two types of reasoning capabilities that we believe are prerequisites for successful scheming: First, we propose five evaluations of ability to reason about and circumvent oversight (stealth). Second, we present eleven evaluations for measuring a model's ability to instrumentally reason about itself, its environment and its deployment (situational awareness). We demonstrate how these evaluations can be used as part of a scheming inability safety case: a model that does not succeed on these evaluations is almost certainly incapable of causing severe harm via scheming in real deployment. We run our evaluations on current frontier models and find that none of them show concerning levels of either situational awareness or stealth.

Mary Phuong, Roland S. Zimmermann, Ziyue Wang, David Lindner, Victoria Krakovna, Sarah Cogan, Allan Dafoe, Lewis Ho, Rohin Shah
arXiv:2505.01420 · cs.LG · submitted May 2, 2025 · updated Jul 3, 2025
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