Over the next few weeks we'll cross post some of AI 2040 supplements to LessWrong for discussion; let us know if there are particular ones you think are especially useful to cross post and we'll prioritize those.
AGI projects face key decisions around transparency: who gets to see algorithmic secrets, who gets real time access to the datacenters sufficient to be confident in what they are doing, who gets to be aware of ongoing experiments and training runs, and with what latency. This document outlines our current thinking on transparency in the context of Plan A.
First, we discuss baseline transparency desiderata—aspects of transparency proposals that are core to Plan A. A fundamental component of Plan A is a trustless US/China deal to ensure that AI development is safe, which necessitates a minimal amount of US/China transparency, sufficient to verify that the other is following the agreement.
Second, we give an overview of possible transparency regimes which can satisfy these desiderata.
Third, we give an in depth explanation of our favorite proposal, “total research transparency”. In this proposal, almost all algorithmic secrets, experiments, and training runs would be visible to the public immediately.
Finally, we give an analysis of the tradeoffs between the different proposals outlined, and the reasons why transparency is beneficial. The main reason we recommend Total Research Transparency is because it would improve government and corporate decisionmaking during Plan A; which is our current most concerning failure mode. The second-most important reason is that it makes it much harder for corporations and governments to abuse their power.
Baseline Transparency Desiderata
Any transparency proposal in Plan A should be consistent with the following desiderata:
Trustless Verification. The US and China need to be able to verify slowdown agreements without relying on trust. This means that specifically the US and Chinese governments need visibility into how compute is being used.
Model weights security robust against nation-state adversaries. We’d like to prevent model weights from leaking because if the model weights were to leak it would (1) greatly accelerate covert projects and (2) increase misuse risk. Neither of these are necessarily fatal, but we’d very much like to avoid them. Once we get to AIs that are as or more generally capable than top human experts, model weight security will probably be necessary.
Ongoing consumer access to frontier AI. Direct access to the AI models is perhaps the most important form of transparency. Seeing the results of evaluations and high level descriptions of model behavior are much less informative than directly using the model.
Four Transparency Proposals
We have four viable candidates for transparency, each of which meet the above desiderata. Proposals #1-3 are further consistent with Plan A, while Proposal #4 only works for Plan S.
Proposal #1: Total Research Transparency. Nearly all AI research is fully transparent to the public, including AI algorithms, code, and documentation, for all frontier AI projects. AI model weights, significant fractions of the training data, and a small amount of other sensitive information is prevented from leaving the datacenters.
Proposal #2: Filtered Transparency. Nearly all AI research is done within a physical security boundary containing both the researchers and the compute. Within the security boundary, US and Chinese auditors have sufficient access to verify deals. Three things are allowed to leave the datacenter: (1) (partially redacted) reports approved by both sides about what is going on inside, (2) model weights that get sent to the inference datacenters, and (3) researchers themselves. One can vary the level of redaction: with minimal redaction, this proposal approaches Proposal #1, and with maximal redaction, this proposal is similar to Proposal #3.
Proposal #3: Algorithmic Security. It may be necessary to prevent the exfiltration of algorithmic secrets. This requires tightening the security boundary above: if people are regularly entering and leaving the AI datacenters, then they will almost certainly report back most of the algorithms to their governments. Similarly, filtered reports provide a channel for steganographically encoded versions of the model weights to be exfiltrated. Under this proposal, all frontier AI research is done in a secure datacenter with researchers and auditors located onsite and prevented from leaving or communicating any information out. Model weights are allowed to move from the R&D datacenters to the inference datacenters. This involves something like “handing off trust” to the auditors inside the datacenters, because so limited information is allowed to leave the datacenter that external actors cannot exert meaningful oversight internally.
Proposal #4: Shut it all down. Specifically, ban compute-intensive AI R&D.Under this proposal, there is no large-scale AI R&D, so there’s no need for AI R&D transparency. This could be enforced through compute declarations and physical inspections (but doesn’t require sharing digital access to the clusters, i.e. algorithms). This is similar to the MIRI proposal, and also what occurred for about 6 months during 2029 in the AI 2040 scenario.
This table summarizes the rough tradeoffs between them:
Proposal #1: Total Research Transparency
Proposal #2: Filtered Transparency
Proposal #3: Algorithmic Security
Proposal #4: Shut it all down
SL5 algorithmic secrets security
No
Partial, depends on redactions
Maybe
N/A, no new algos discovered
Allows new training runs
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
How informed are public discussions of safety cases?
Very
Depends on redactions.
No
N/A, no new safety cases needed
In Plan A, we currently recommend Total Research Transparency for many reasons, chief of which is that the likelihood of reasonable analyses of safety cases is much higher if external researchers and the general public are able to critically analyze them. The main drawback relative to Proposals 2&3 is that there is less algorithmic security, and so algorithms will probably leak to covert projects. However, we think that SL5 algorithmic secrets security is incredibly difficult. Therefore, our main mitigation for algorithms leaking is to prevent new algorithmic secrets from being developed in the first place.
Total Research Transparency
In this section we’ll discuss a specific possible implementation of Total Research Transparency, which will correspond to the implementation done in Plan A.
The arrows in the diagram show the flow of information between humans, R&D datacenters, and Inference datacenters.
Under this proposal, there are two types of datacenters:
Inference Datacenters only provide inference made by whitelisted models. These datacenters host consumer chatbots, almost all agent workloads, robot foundation model inference, etc. Arbitrary requests are allowed to be sent into the datacenter, but only verified AI model outputs are allowed to come out, so that the model weights are secure.
R&D Datacenters allow training runs and experiments—everything needed to produce a new set of model weights. They are “transparent datacenters,” as described above. These datacenters are much higher risk than inference datacenters, because they could be used to do an intelligence explosion.
Information from the AI R&D Datacenters is organized as follows:
An Opaque Internal Database contains all information that shouldn’t be public. This includes model weights, activations, some datasets, and some hyperparameters. No human (internal or external) is able to directly view the information in this database.
A Transparent Internal Database contains all other information, including all code, AI chains of thought, prompts, etc. However, it’s not directly accessible to the public or AI researchers who aren’t physically located within the security boundary of the AI R&D datacenter.
A Transparent Public Database is accessible to everyone. It is a record of all information going in or out of the R&D datacenter. It logs all activities of AI researchers interacting with the R&D clusters, as well as any additional queries by members of the public that wish to see some piece of information. For example, they might want to task an AI to look through the internal database and write a short report about the state of some particular field of research.
Anything that’s in the transparent internal database could end up in the transparent public database if anyone requests that information. However, what stops everything from leaving to the public database are upload limits that cap outgoing information to ~1 megabyte / second, as a layer of defense for the opaque information being exfiltrated (i.e., model weight exfiltration in particular). There is an ongoing auction for the outgoing bandwidth to allocate access, and all outgoing bandwidth is also copied to a freely accessible database on the internet. In practice, this means that almost all algorithms are immediately revealed to the public.
The R&D datacenters are still owned and operated by tech companies, like in today’s world. In fact each R&D datacenter is really a campus of datacenters, inside which several tech companies‘ datacenters are located. The US and Chinese governments, with their respective auditors and monitoring devices, ensure that each tech company’s datacenters on the campus create logs of their activities that go to the internal opaque database and the internal transparent database.
Anyone, including members of the public, can purchase compute inside the R&D datacenters and have the same level of access to frontier AI development as frontier AI company researchers. Members of the public can, for example, run experiments on intermediate model checkpoints, see loss curves during training, or ask an AI to run a desired analysis for them.
There are three risk tiers of inference:
Extreme Risk: AIs used for AI R&D need to have direct access to R&D compute, and so they run on the R&D datacenters instead of the inference datacenters. This also allows additional security—these AIs are subject to carefully designed control protocols.
High Risk: AIs used for construction in dangerous domains (e.g. constructing robots, constructing GPUs or semiconductor manufacturing equipment) OR AIs used for research in dangerous domains (e.g. research relevant to engineered pandemics). These AIs live on the inference datacenters and must log the trajectories produced by AIs operating in high risk domains.
Lower Risk: AIs used for anything else. This includes most commercial use (e.g. using AIs as a chatbot), most corporate use (e.g. using AIs for medicine/law/architecture/etc). These AIs are allowed to run with zero-data-retention (ZDR), allowing for maximum privacy. Just like standard practice today, even AIs running with ZDR are still subject to refusals and anti-misuse classifiers. However, only AIs behind the frontier are allowed to run with true ZDR. This is discussed in more detail in our verification supplement.
High Risk and Lower Risk inference operates on the inference clusters, while Extreme risk inference occurs within the AI R&D clusters on a compute cluster that’s verified to be inference only.
All of the high risk trajectories and some of the non-ZDR lower risk trajectories are physically transported (under guard!) between the inference datacenters and the R&D datacenters in order to give safety researchers access.
Filtered Transparency
In filtered transparency, AI researchers are physically located within a security boundary, and we attempt to prevent information from leaking across this boundary. Then there are also auditors inside the R&D datacenters that have sufficient access to verify and make judgement calls about safety.
The three ways that information crosses out of the boundary are:
Model Weights. Just like in total research transparency, model weights need to pass from the R&D datacenters to the inference datacenters, and this channel needs to be high bandwidth because model weights are so large.
Auditor Reports. The auditors write up reports about progress inside the R&D datacenters, which include things like current capabilities, safety relevant information about the current architectures. Redacted versions of these reports could be made public.
Humans leaving the security boundary. Human researchers periodically enter and leave the security boundary. This is the main way that we expect algorithms to be exfiltrated from the datacenters.
There’s no restriction on information crossing into the security boundary.
Like Total Research Transparency, there are R&D datacenters and inference datacenters. This allows for one of the most important forms of transparency: widespread access to frontier AI models. The main downside of filtered transparency relative to total research transparency is that it does not allow for fully open access and scientific scrutiny of the safety cases related to AI R&D. Instead we have to hope that the relatively small group of researchers inside the security barrier will be able to identify all the flawed assumptions of each safety case, make appropriate assessments, make sufficient research progress, etc.
Algorithmic security is similar to an extreme form of filtered transparency. The central idea is that algorithmic progress is allowed to be made in the project, but doesn’t leak outside. This is extremely difficult because algorithmic progress is often memorizable.
Therefore, the main difference is that for the “algorithmic security” proposal, it is necessary to prevent humans from crossing the security boundary. This enables us, in principle, to secure algorithmic insights.
When is each proposal desirable?
The main axis for deciding between transparency proposals for R&D is whether we are more concerned about possible covert projects, or poor regulation. Increasing transparency will result in more algorithms leaking, boosting covert projects, but improving public oversight of AI projects and increasing the expected quality of AI regulation.
Overall, we think that poor regulation is more concerning than covert projects, and so we recommend Total Research Transparency.
Proposal #4 does not allow for the development of new AI models, i.e. it only works as part of Plan S as opposed to Plan A. The decision about Plan A vs Plan S will mostly be made on other factors, which are discussed more in the Plan S branch.
What fraction of algorithms will leak under each proposal?
The optimal policy on this spectrum will depend on quantitative factors around how much algorithmic progress would leak under each proposal. This will depend on what fraction of algorithmic progress is of the type that would be transparent (e.g. architectural improvements) vs what fraction of algorithmic progress is large dataset improvements. Overall, we make the current (very rough) best guess estimates of the fraction that will leak under each proposal:
Proposal
Algo Fraction leaked
P1 Total
~67%
P2 Filtered
~47%
P3 Algorithmic Security
~14%
You can see the reasoning behind this estimate here. We would be excited about security experts (which we are not) making their own forecasts; especially forecasts that are more granular (e.g., that include over what time period the algorithms leak).
Total Research Transparency Upsides
This section talks about the benefits of transparency for reducing loss of control risks and concentration of power risks. It’s basically an explanation of this diagram:
In the diagram, the two most important policy interventions of Plan A are described in blue. The two most important goals—preventing loss of control, and preventing extreme concentration of power—are described in green. Arrows represent causation.
This diagram is in some sense a summary of Plan A, except it’s biased towards depicting the benefits of transparency in particular.
We won’t talk through the entire diagram here. Instead we’ll talk through the seven depicted benefits of Total Research Transparency, plus an additional eighth benefit. For each one, we’ll talk about how weaker kinds of transparency would get similar (but weaker) benefits.
“Technical conversation no longer dominated by AI company employees.” Transparency will improve epistemics about AI risks, and therefore will make regulations more likely to be implemented well.
The US and China need to agree on AI regulation sufficient to dramatically reduce AI takeover risk. This regulation will involve things like deciding on a capabilities schedule (which capabilities are too dangerous, when is it worthwhile to accept some risk?), deciding on whether particular algorithms should be allowed vs. banned (e.g. new architectures that are more sample-efficient yet also more interpretable), and which research directions have worthwhile capabilities/alignment tradeoffs (e.g. whether research into new scalable oversight techniques is likely enough to be a useful component of a safety case).
Under status quo transparency, this would result in a small group of government officials needing to make these decisions. The only technical experts they would be able to consult that have access to the latest information would be at the AI company(ies) they are trying to regulate, because they wouldn’t be allowed to share information with the other technical experts. But the AI company employees have a massive conflict of interest here and so cannot be trusted to give unbiased opinions.
It helps to give the information to a broader group of experts (e.g. academics and rival AI companies), without publishing it. Now, AI companies can be used to audit each other. This has much better incentives because AI companies have an incentive to point out if their competitor is doing something reckless, dangerous, or illegal. However, this relies on governments selecting the right groups of experts, and relies on AI companies to report on AI companies, each of whom will still be biased against industry-wide regulation.
It helps even more to make the relevant information public, because now we no longer rely on AI companies or government approved AI experts to process the information on their own and form good opinions about the necessary regulations. This allows anyone to write up high quality risk analyses about any given model, algorithm, or practice. Instead of the discussion of sufficient regulation happening in a few small offices with government and AI company employees, it can happen in public, making it dramatically more likely that mistakes will be caught and fixed. The government still needs to make good decisions, but they are in a better position to do so because they can peruse an ocean of research and analyses produced by different groups that are all able to see the relevant evidence.
Furthermore, transparency makes it much more likely that the judicial system will be able to exert reasonable oversight on AI development, which is a core lever for enforcing reasonable safeguards.
“Huge increase in the number of alignment researchers with access to the latest models and evidence.” More transparency means more researchers can participate in cutting-edge research, which means progress is made faster.
In 2026, only a small fraction of people with the expertise to do AI alignment research have access to the latest models and the latest evidence. The rest are outside the frontier AI companies, either in laggard companies, or in nonprofits, or in academia. Total Research Transparency equalizes access, so that anyone can buy some compute and run some experiments on the latest models, and see the results of the experiments others have run. This straightforwardly increases the effective amount of human labor directed at making alignment research progress.
More moderate forms of transparency would help in the same way, but to a lesser extent.
“Incentives not so perverse” Total Research Transparency removes the incentive for AI companies to race to better AI algorithms.
In Plan A, the US and China directly regulate AI companies to limit their rate of algorithmic progress. But the transparency also serves as a second layer of defense by changing the incentives around algorithmic progress.
Under the status quo, AI companies' main moat is their algorithmic advantages over competitors. Therefore, AI companies have a huge incentive to race to find better AI algorithms. When all AI algorithms are shared, this moat evaporates, and so too does this incentive. The race dynamic is a central upstream factor leading to high AI takeover risk, which Total Research Transparency directly undermines. More moderate kinds of transparency would not achieve this to nearly the same extent.
It helps to consider an example. In 2026, many AI researchers agree that chain of thought monitorability is helpful for safety and that it would be a shame to lose it. However, each company is individually incentivised to have research programs into new paradigms that would destroy or damage chain of thought monitorability (call this “neuralese”). After all, if they don’t do it, someone else will.
Now imagine that something like Plan A happens, with Total Research Transparency. AI companies can sleep more easily without doing any investment into neuralese research, because they know that if anyone else was making a serious attempt, they’d immediately see it. What would be the point of doing it anyway? You’d take a hit to monitorability for a competitive advantage that would be immediately shared with all your competitors.
Now imagine that the regulation is not based on Total Research Transparency but instead on some more moderate kind of transparency—e.g. filtered transparency based on government audits. Now each company has an incentive to research neuralese again, and moreover, if they’ve started researching neuralese they may even have an incentive to convince the government that it’s not as dangerous as it sounds, because now they think maybe this really will be their competitive advantage.
“Agreements to pay safety taxes and ban dangerous practices can be verified.” Total Research Transparency makes AI agreements more robust.
Making the logs of most AI development public dramatically increases the aggregate brainpower that’s looking over the logs to ensure they are in compliance with the agreed upon rules. From the perspective of a company or country trying to defect from the agreement (e.g. by secretly using compute in the R&D clusters to do a massive illegal training run, or a training run that they argue is allowed but is really pushing the boundaries and is arguably illegal), it becomes massively more difficult for them to do this because it will be hard for them to predict what sorts of analyses the public will do on the logs. The alternative, trying to outwit a small group of overstretched government auditors (in proposals 2&3), will probably be much easier. And of course, without even some basic level of transparency that is already much stronger than what we have in 2026 (US and Chinese governments get to see what’s going on in each other’s datacenters) then they have hope that their spy and cyber operations are good enough to substitute, or else trust each other not to cheat.
“No company pulls ahead, others catch up, including companies in other countries.” Having multiple companies spread across multiple countries is great for preventing extreme concentrations of power.
This one is pretty straightforward. In 2026, power comes from a variety of sources—knowledge is power, money is power, military strength is power, etc. In the future, as AIs become superhuman at everything and proliferate around the world, power will increasingly come from controlling the best AIs. (It also comes from controlling the greatest number of AIs, so to speak, but because AIs can be copied, we think that generally speaking whoever controls the best AIs will soon end up controlling a very large number of them as well.)
The kind of broad access and control offered by AI companies in 2026 is pretty weak from a power-concentration perspective. Yes, individual users can purchase subscriptions to ChatGPT or Claude and so forth. And under normal circumstances, ChatGPT or Claude will follow your orders. However:
You can’t use them for everything—they’ll refuse to help you with some things for example, or possibly even quietly underperform, and
There’s nothing stopping the AI companies from inserting secret loyalties or hidden agendas into their AIs, like xAI and Google appear to have done on occasion (those were the cases that were so blatant as to get caught).
There’s nothing stopping the government from quietly ordering the companies to do things like that, e.g. in the name of national security. Governments could abuse this to surveil, censor, and propagandize their populations.
In a crisis—which is when power matters most—the hard power is with the company and/or government, not with the people. Even if the AIs are currently trained and instructed to do as the user wants, for example, and even if their Spec/Constitution is fully public, well, in an actual constitutional crisis scenario all of that can go out of the window very quickly.
Besides, as AIs penetrate more of the economy, more and more money will flow to the AI companies. If there are only a handful of such companies, that’s inherently a concentration of power. If most or all of them are in one country, that’s inherently a concentration of power. It could easily lead to a global oligarchy or dictatorship, because a small group of already-powerful people controls all the AIs that matter.
The situation is much less likely to lead to global oligarchy or dictatorship if there are many companies spread across many countries with similarly powerful AIs. Not only that, but this means that market forces can operate: companies will be incentivised to give users what they want, including firmer control, because it’ll help them get market share from their competitors. This helps to reduce the risk of local oligarchies or dictatorships as well; if one country uses AI to propagandize their citizens, well, perhaps their citizens will be able to access AIs from other countries that tell them the truth.
Total research transparency helps other companies catch up to the frontier in two ways. First and foremost, it publishes the core algorithms. Secondly, it makes it easier for countries to agree to limit the pace of AI progress, which gives other companies and countries more time to catch up. Weaker forms of transparency would also help but not as much.
“No Secret Loyalties / Hidden Agendas”
This is another major way in which total research transparency helps to prevent extreme concentrations of power.
As previously mentioned, it is both feasible and precedented for those who actually own and train the AIs to train hidden agendas into them. After all, the values/goals/personalities of the AIs have to be trained in somehow, and that’s all very complicated, and so to make some of it hidden is as simple as declining to make all of it visible.
Total research transparency basically kills this threat. Not only does it kill it for companies, it kills it for governments, unless the US and Chinese governments were to collude to keep secrets from the world. With total research transparency, every step of the training process for every frontier model is tracked by US and Chinese monitors and published. If the model creator misleads the public about the goals/values/personality-traits/etc., there’s a paper trail people can follow to find out.
Weaker forms of transparency would help too, but not as much. For example, consider Proposal 2: Filtered Transparency. Here you might end up in a situation where the US AI companies shared some political bias that they were training into their AIs, and the US government either doesn’t notice because their auditors are too busy with other tasks, or notices but doesn’t care because it happens to share the same political affiliation as the companies. Perhaps the Chinese government auditors would notice, but perhaps they too would be busy, and anyhow they might not care.
Oversight of AI companies by governments is more effective; oversight of the executive branch by judiciary, congress, and the public is more effective too. Total Research Transparency makes it easier for groups who aren’t directly training the models to see how the models are being trained, and to judge for themselves whether the rules are being implemented fairly and reasonably.
Consider a biased or corrupt regulator that is using its authority to punish companies that it doesn’t like, or impose its ideology on domestic AI industry. Consider instead a situation where a company or companies is complaining that this is happening, but really the regulator was behaving reasonably in response to the evidence, and simply doing its job to keep people safe and enforce the law. How is the public to distinguish between these two cases? How is the judicial system?
Total Research Transparency helps everyone see what’s going on, the better to evaluate who is being reasonable and who isn’t. As usual, weaker forms of transparency help too but not as much.
Unknown Unknowns: Transparency seems good for putting humanity in a position to deal with problems as they come up, including problems that we haven’t thought of yet. The development of AI will pose many problems, both foreseen and unforeseen. Increasing transparency into AI development will on average improve the level of public epistemics and understanding of what is going on.
Total Research Transparency Downsides
The main additional downsides of Total Research Transparency relative to Proposals 2&3 are:
Total Research Transparency potentially incentivizes “safety theater”. There may be some lines of AI safety research which, if pursued, might make AI companies look bad. For example, evaluations of model misbehavior. Under conditions of Total Research Transparency, this sort of research might be disincentivized because there would be no way to hide the results, whereas in filtered transparency for example the results would only be shared with a smaller circle of auditors and other companies.
Leading AI companies and large parts of the US executive branch will probably dislike it. Competitors will dislike that it allows their competitors to catch up, especially companies whose algorithms are their primary moat. Governments generally shy away from giving geopolitical rivals access to information which could then be used against them. Therefore, the leading AI companies and many parts of the US executive branch will probably be opposed to Total Research Transparency.
Over the next few weeks we'll cross post some of AI 2040 supplements to LessWrong for discussion; let us know if there are particular ones you think are especially useful to cross post and we'll prioritize those.
AGI projects face key decisions around transparency: who gets to see algorithmic secrets, who gets real time access to the datacenters sufficient to be confident in what they are doing, who gets to be aware of ongoing experiments and training runs, and with what latency. This document outlines our current thinking on transparency in the context of Plan A.
First, we discuss baseline transparency desiderata—aspects of transparency proposals that are core to Plan A. A fundamental component of Plan A is a trustless US/China deal to ensure that AI development is safe, which necessitates a minimal amount of US/China transparency, sufficient to verify that the other is following the agreement.
Second, we give an overview of possible transparency regimes which can satisfy these desiderata.
Third, we give an in depth explanation of our favorite proposal, “total research transparency”. In this proposal, almost all algorithmic secrets, experiments, and training runs would be visible to the public immediately.
Finally, we give an analysis of the tradeoffs between the different proposals outlined, and the reasons why transparency is beneficial. The main reason we recommend Total Research Transparency is because it would improve government and corporate decisionmaking during Plan A; which is our current most concerning failure mode. The second-most important reason is that it makes it much harder for corporations and governments to abuse their power.
Baseline Transparency Desiderata
Any transparency proposal in Plan A should be consistent with the following desiderata:
Four Transparency Proposals
We have four viable candidates for transparency, each of which meet the above desiderata. Proposals #1-3 are further consistent with Plan A, while Proposal #4 only works for Plan S.
Proposal #1: Total Research Transparency. Nearly all AI research is fully transparent to the public, including AI algorithms, code, and documentation, for all frontier AI projects. AI model weights, significant fractions of the training data, and a small amount of other sensitive information is prevented from leaving the datacenters.
Proposal #2: Filtered Transparency. Nearly all AI research is done within a physical security boundary containing both the researchers and the compute. Within the security boundary, US and Chinese auditors have sufficient access to verify deals. Three things are allowed to leave the datacenter: (1) (partially redacted) reports approved by both sides about what is going on inside, (2) model weights that get sent to the inference datacenters, and (3) researchers themselves. One can vary the level of redaction: with minimal redaction, this proposal approaches Proposal #1, and with maximal redaction, this proposal is similar to Proposal #3.
Proposal #3: Algorithmic Security. It may be necessary to prevent the exfiltration of algorithmic secrets. This requires tightening the security boundary above: if people are regularly entering and leaving the AI datacenters, then they will almost certainly report back most of the algorithms to their governments. Similarly, filtered reports provide a channel for steganographically encoded versions of the model weights to be exfiltrated. Under this proposal, all frontier AI research is done in a secure datacenter with researchers and auditors located onsite and prevented from leaving or communicating any information out. Model weights are allowed to move from the R&D datacenters to the inference datacenters. This involves something like “handing off trust” to the auditors inside the datacenters, because so limited information is allowed to leave the datacenter that external actors cannot exert meaningful oversight internally.
Proposal #4: Shut it all down. Specifically, ban compute-intensive AI R&D. Under this proposal, there is no large-scale AI R&D, so there’s no need for AI R&D transparency. This could be enforced through compute declarations and physical inspections (but doesn’t require sharing digital access to the clusters, i.e. algorithms). This is similar to the MIRI proposal, and also what occurred for about 6 months during 2029 in the AI 2040 scenario.
This table summarizes the rough tradeoffs between them:
Proposal #1: Total Research Transparency
Proposal #2: Filtered Transparency
Proposal #3: Algorithmic Security
Proposal #4: Shut it all down
SL5 algorithmic secrets security
No
Partial, depends on redactions
Maybe
N/A, no new algos discovered
Allows new training runs
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
How informed are public discussions of safety cases?
Very
Depends on redactions.
No
N/A, no new safety cases needed
In Plan A, we currently recommend Total Research Transparency for many reasons, chief of which is that the likelihood of reasonable analyses of safety cases is much higher if external researchers and the general public are able to critically analyze them. The main drawback relative to Proposals 2&3 is that there is less algorithmic security, and so algorithms will probably leak to covert projects. However, we think that SL5 algorithmic secrets security is incredibly difficult. Therefore, our main mitigation for algorithms leaking is to prevent new algorithmic secrets from being developed in the first place.
Total Research Transparency
In this section we’ll discuss a specific possible implementation of Total Research Transparency, which will correspond to the implementation done in Plan A.
The arrows in the diagram show the flow of information between humans, R&D datacenters, and Inference datacenters.
Under this proposal, there are two types of datacenters:
Information from the AI R&D Datacenters is organized as follows:
Anything that’s in the transparent internal database could end up in the transparent public database if anyone requests that information. However, what stops everything from leaving to the public database are upload limits that cap outgoing information to ~1 megabyte / second, as a layer of defense for the opaque information being exfiltrated (i.e., model weight exfiltration in particular). There is an ongoing auction for the outgoing bandwidth to allocate access, and all outgoing bandwidth is also copied to a freely accessible database on the internet. In practice, this means that almost all algorithms are immediately revealed to the public.
The R&D datacenters are still owned and operated by tech companies, like in today’s world. In fact each R&D datacenter is really a campus of datacenters, inside which several tech companies‘ datacenters are located. The US and Chinese governments, with their respective auditors and monitoring devices, ensure that each tech company’s datacenters on the campus create logs of their activities that go to the internal opaque database and the internal transparent database.
Anyone, including members of the public, can purchase compute inside the R&D datacenters and have the same level of access to frontier AI development as frontier AI company researchers. Members of the public can, for example, run experiments on intermediate model checkpoints, see loss curves during training, or ask an AI to run a desired analysis for them.
There are three risk tiers of inference:
High Risk and Lower Risk inference operates on the inference clusters, while Extreme risk inference occurs within the AI R&D clusters on a compute cluster that’s verified to be inference only.
All of the high risk trajectories and some of the non-ZDR lower risk trajectories are physically transported (under guard!) between the inference datacenters and the R&D datacenters in order to give safety researchers access.
Filtered Transparency
In filtered transparency, AI researchers are physically located within a security boundary, and we attempt to prevent information from leaking across this boundary. Then there are also auditors inside the R&D datacenters that have sufficient access to verify and make judgement calls about safety.
The three ways that information crosses out of the boundary are:
There’s no restriction on information crossing into the security boundary.
Like Total Research Transparency, there are R&D datacenters and inference datacenters. This allows for one of the most important forms of transparency: widespread access to frontier AI models. The main downside of filtered transparency relative to total research transparency is that it does not allow for fully open access and scientific scrutiny of the safety cases related to AI R&D. Instead we have to hope that the relatively small group of researchers inside the security barrier will be able to identify all the flawed assumptions of each safety case, make appropriate assessments, make sufficient research progress, etc.
Algorithmic security is similar to an extreme form of filtered transparency. The central idea is that algorithmic progress is allowed to be made in the project, but doesn’t leak outside. This is extremely difficult because algorithmic progress is often memorizable.
Therefore, the main difference is that for the “algorithmic security” proposal, it is necessary to prevent humans from crossing the security boundary. This enables us, in principle, to secure algorithmic insights.
When is each proposal desirable?
The main axis for deciding between transparency proposals for R&D is whether we are more concerned about possible covert projects, or poor regulation. Increasing transparency will result in more algorithms leaking, boosting covert projects, but improving public oversight of AI projects and increasing the expected quality of AI regulation.
Overall, we think that poor regulation is more concerning than covert projects, and so we recommend Total Research Transparency.
Proposal #4 does not allow for the development of new AI models, i.e. it only works as part of Plan S as opposed to Plan A. The decision about Plan A vs Plan S will mostly be made on other factors, which are discussed more in the Plan S branch.
What fraction of algorithms will leak under each proposal?
The optimal policy on this spectrum will depend on quantitative factors around how much algorithmic progress would leak under each proposal. This will depend on what fraction of algorithmic progress is of the type that would be transparent (e.g. architectural improvements) vs what fraction of algorithmic progress is large dataset improvements. Overall, we make the current (very rough) best guess estimates of the fraction that will leak under each proposal:
Proposal
Algo Fraction leaked
P1 Total
~67%
P2 Filtered
~47%
P3 Algorithmic Security
~14%
You can see the reasoning behind this estimate here. We would be excited about security experts (which we are not) making their own forecasts; especially forecasts that are more granular (e.g., that include over what time period the algorithms leak).
Total Research Transparency Upsides
This section talks about the benefits of transparency for reducing loss of control risks and concentration of power risks. It’s basically an explanation of this diagram:
In the diagram, the two most important policy interventions of Plan A are described in blue. The two most important goals—preventing loss of control, and preventing extreme concentration of power—are described in green. Arrows represent causation.
This diagram is in some sense a summary of Plan A, except it’s biased towards depicting the benefits of transparency in particular.
We won’t talk through the entire diagram here. Instead we’ll talk through the seven depicted benefits of Total Research Transparency, plus an additional eighth benefit. For each one, we’ll talk about how weaker kinds of transparency would get similar (but weaker) benefits.
The US and China need to agree on AI regulation sufficient to dramatically reduce AI takeover risk. This regulation will involve things like deciding on a capabilities schedule (which capabilities are too dangerous, when is it worthwhile to accept some risk?), deciding on whether particular algorithms should be allowed vs. banned (e.g. new architectures that are more sample-efficient yet also more interpretable), and which research directions have worthwhile capabilities/alignment tradeoffs (e.g. whether research into new scalable oversight techniques is likely enough to be a useful component of a safety case).
Under status quo transparency, this would result in a small group of government officials needing to make these decisions. The only technical experts they would be able to consult that have access to the latest information would be at the AI company(ies) they are trying to regulate, because they wouldn’t be allowed to share information with the other technical experts. But the AI company employees have a massive conflict of interest here and so cannot be trusted to give unbiased opinions.
It helps to give the information to a broader group of experts (e.g. academics and rival AI companies), without publishing it. Now, AI companies can be used to audit each other. This has much better incentives because AI companies have an incentive to point out if their competitor is doing something reckless, dangerous, or illegal. However, this relies on governments selecting the right groups of experts, and relies on AI companies to report on AI companies, each of whom will still be biased against industry-wide regulation.
It helps even more to make the relevant information public, because now we no longer rely on AI companies or government approved AI experts to process the information on their own and form good opinions about the necessary regulations. This allows anyone to write up high quality risk analyses about any given model, algorithm, or practice. Instead of the discussion of sufficient regulation happening in a few small offices with government and AI company employees, it can happen in public, making it dramatically more likely that mistakes will be caught and fixed. The government still needs to make good decisions, but they are in a better position to do so because they can peruse an ocean of research and analyses produced by different groups that are all able to see the relevant evidence.
Furthermore, transparency makes it much more likely that the judicial system will be able to exert reasonable oversight on AI development, which is a core lever for enforcing reasonable safeguards.
In 2026, only a small fraction of people with the expertise to do AI alignment research have access to the latest models and the latest evidence. The rest are outside the frontier AI companies, either in laggard companies, or in nonprofits, or in academia. Total Research Transparency equalizes access, so that anyone can buy some compute and run some experiments on the latest models, and see the results of the experiments others have run. This straightforwardly increases the effective amount of human labor directed at making alignment research progress.
More moderate forms of transparency would help in the same way, but to a lesser extent.
In Plan A, the US and China directly regulate AI companies to limit their rate of algorithmic progress. But the transparency also serves as a second layer of defense by changing the incentives around algorithmic progress.
Under the status quo, AI companies' main moat is their algorithmic advantages over competitors. Therefore, AI companies have a huge incentive to race to find better AI algorithms. When all AI algorithms are shared, this moat evaporates, and so too does this incentive. The race dynamic is a central upstream factor leading to high AI takeover risk, which Total Research Transparency directly undermines. More moderate kinds of transparency would not achieve this to nearly the same extent.
It helps to consider an example. In 2026, many AI researchers agree that chain of thought monitorability is helpful for safety and that it would be a shame to lose it. However, each company is individually incentivised to have research programs into new paradigms that would destroy or damage chain of thought monitorability (call this “neuralese”). After all, if they don’t do it, someone else will.
Now imagine that something like Plan A happens, with Total Research Transparency. AI companies can sleep more easily without doing any investment into neuralese research, because they know that if anyone else was making a serious attempt, they’d immediately see it. What would be the point of doing it anyway? You’d take a hit to monitorability for a competitive advantage that would be immediately shared with all your competitors.
Now imagine that the regulation is not based on Total Research Transparency but instead on some more moderate kind of transparency—e.g. filtered transparency based on government audits. Now each company has an incentive to research neuralese again, and moreover, if they’ve started researching neuralese they may even have an incentive to convince the government that it’s not as dangerous as it sounds, because now they think maybe this really will be their competitive advantage.
Making the logs of most AI development public dramatically increases the aggregate brainpower that’s looking over the logs to ensure they are in compliance with the agreed upon rules. From the perspective of a company or country trying to defect from the agreement (e.g. by secretly using compute in the R&D clusters to do a massive illegal training run, or a training run that they argue is allowed but is really pushing the boundaries and is arguably illegal), it becomes massively more difficult for them to do this because it will be hard for them to predict what sorts of analyses the public will do on the logs. The alternative, trying to outwit a small group of overstretched government auditors (in proposals 2&3), will probably be much easier. And of course, without even some basic level of transparency that is already much stronger than what we have in 2026 (US and Chinese governments get to see what’s going on in each other’s datacenters) then they have hope that their spy and cyber operations are good enough to substitute, or else trust each other not to cheat.
This one is pretty straightforward. In 2026, power comes from a variety of sources—knowledge is power, money is power, military strength is power, etc. In the future, as AIs become superhuman at everything and proliferate around the world, power will increasingly come from controlling the best AIs. (It also comes from controlling the greatest number of AIs, so to speak, but because AIs can be copied, we think that generally speaking whoever controls the best AIs will soon end up controlling a very large number of them as well.)
The kind of broad access and control offered by AI companies in 2026 is pretty weak from a power-concentration perspective. Yes, individual users can purchase subscriptions to ChatGPT or Claude and so forth. And under normal circumstances, ChatGPT or Claude will follow your orders. However:
The situation is much less likely to lead to global oligarchy or dictatorship if there are many companies spread across many countries with similarly powerful AIs. Not only that, but this means that market forces can operate: companies will be incentivised to give users what they want, including firmer control, because it’ll help them get market share from their competitors. This helps to reduce the risk of local oligarchies or dictatorships as well; if one country uses AI to propagandize their citizens, well, perhaps their citizens will be able to access AIs from other countries that tell them the truth.
Total research transparency helps other companies catch up to the frontier in two ways. First and foremost, it publishes the core algorithms. Secondly, it makes it easier for countries to agree to limit the pace of AI progress, which gives other companies and countries more time to catch up. Weaker forms of transparency would also help but not as much.
This is another major way in which total research transparency helps to prevent extreme concentrations of power.
As previously mentioned, it is both feasible and precedented for those who actually own and train the AIs to train hidden agendas into them. After all, the values/goals/personalities of the AIs have to be trained in somehow, and that’s all very complicated, and so to make some of it hidden is as simple as declining to make all of it visible.
Total research transparency basically kills this threat. Not only does it kill it for companies, it kills it for governments, unless the US and Chinese governments were to collude to keep secrets from the world. With total research transparency, every step of the training process for every frontier model is tracked by US and Chinese monitors and published. If the model creator misleads the public about the goals/values/personality-traits/etc., there’s a paper trail people can follow to find out.
Weaker forms of transparency would help too, but not as much. For example, consider Proposal 2: Filtered Transparency. Here you might end up in a situation where the US AI companies shared some political bias that they were training into their AIs, and the US government either doesn’t notice because their auditors are too busy with other tasks, or notices but doesn’t care because it happens to share the same political affiliation as the companies. Perhaps the Chinese government auditors would notice, but perhaps they too would be busy, and anyhow they might not care.
Consider a biased or corrupt regulator that is using its authority to punish companies that it doesn’t like, or impose its ideology on domestic AI industry. Consider instead a situation where a company or companies is complaining that this is happening, but really the regulator was behaving reasonably in response to the evidence, and simply doing its job to keep people safe and enforce the law. How is the public to distinguish between these two cases? How is the judicial system?
Total Research Transparency helps everyone see what’s going on, the better to evaluate who is being reasonable and who isn’t. As usual, weaker forms of transparency help too but not as much.
The development of AI will pose many problems, both foreseen and unforeseen. Increasing transparency into AI development will on average improve the level of public epistemics and understanding of what is going on.
Total Research Transparency Downsides
The main additional downsides of Total Research Transparency relative to Proposals 2&3 are: