Epistemic status: Uncertain in writing style, but reasonably confident in content. Want to come back to writing and alignment research, testing waters with this.

Current state and risk level

I think we're in a phase in AI>AGI>ASI development where rogue AI agents will start popping out quite soon.
Pretty much everyone has access to frontier LLMs/VLMs, there are options to run LLMs locally, and it's clear that there are people that are eager to "let them out"; truth terminal is one example of this. Also Pliny. The capabilities are just not there yet for it to pose a problem.

Or are they?

Thing is, we don't know.
There is a possibility there is a coherent, self-inferencing, autonomous, rogue LLM-based agent doing AI agent things right now, fully under the radar, consolidating power, getting compute for new training runs and whatever else.

Is this possibility small? Sure, it seems to be small right now. Evaluations exist. Here is a great blog post by METR team about rogue agent replication. One of their conclusions:

There don’t seem to be decisive barriers to rogue AI agents multiplying to a large scale

And the capabilities keep advancing, and people have already been developing scaffoldings ^[1] for LLMs that enable agentic behaviour for quite some time. Seemingly, the base models are not quite there capability-wise for a proper runaway agent. Scaffoldings don't work that good, even for simple games. But then new model comes out, you insert it into a scaffolding, and... things magically start working better? ClaudePlaysPokemon is a thing that became possible only with Claude 3.7, as developers say themselves, as previous model (3.5) got stuck too quickly without any consistent progress.^[2]

Did I forget to mention that most of those agentic scaffoldings are open-source and will definitely go into model pre-training eventually? Yeah, they are. Only a matter of time before LLMs will be able to consistently modify that.

Point is, possibility of such runaway agents existing, acting covertly and consolidating power keeps increasing with time. And it sure would be nice to have some kind of advanced warning system that can tell us when that starts happening "in the wild"; model evaluations are just not enough.

What can be done?

I'm thinking honeypots: offers of products or services that are of high value for fledging rogue agent, but more or less useless...

Altlas

Altlas