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My short story, You're Absolutely Right (SPOILERS in block) tried to imagine a future where a frontier lab had some real (and significant!) safeguards beyond what current frontier labs had
but it still didn't matter anyway.
continuous CoT monitoring
fairly decent security (eg Megalodon couldn’t exfiltrate its own weights out without the user’s credentials, multiple layers of automated safeguards that prevented the user from checking in his code).
Given recent news it sure seems like the cybersecurity at Magma is better than OpenAI’s, and probably Anthropic's.
at least 3 distinct red-teaming/evaluation systems, implied to have nontrivial real influence rather than just safetywashing:
the third party non-profit evaluator Phoebus,
the internal red-teaming AI agents (implied to be aligned and competent),
the government Systems Audit and auditors
aligned-enough frontier models
the Mammoth 5.8 models were nice and warned the researcher repeatedly his project was a bad idea
it's implied the Magma Forge subagents wouldn't have programmed the whole thing if they had more context
he had to use helpfuler-helpful models to decompose the problem and even that wasn’t enough in the end without Steering Vectors
the aligned-enough models were already extremely good at programming and digital forensics.
the models were much more jailbreak-resistant than mid-2026-era models
At least some good people who were concerned
A law in place (DAISY) to prevent/reduce catastrophic outcomes
my headcanon was that this is the compromise legislation in place after the RAISE Act (mandatory reporting for above 1 billion in damages or 100 deaths) was struck down for being too draconian.
While it's written primarily as a corporate dysfunction horror story rather than an "alignment is extremely hard even if you try your best to die with dignity" story, I did try my best to communicate a nuanced message about how such dysfunctions work: it's almost never the result of a single actor or a single fateful decision, pretty much every institutional fuckup had a pattern with multiple in-retrospect fatal errors:
Yet at the same time it's not like the companies/institutions do everything wrong. Neither the individuals involved nor the institution overall are cartoon villains; truly enormous degrees of dysfunction at basic things can co-exist with getting a bunch of reasonable stuff right, including sometimes subtle ones.
I'd be excited to read and potentially write other sociologically-realistic science fiction in the future. Seems like the world is starved of this type of fiction compared to the (already rare) subgenres of technically realistic hard science fiction and psychologically realistic individual humanities fiction.