I also suspect that the scheming level requirements might also be related to the very ease of the secret task which the schemer wants to accomplish.

Suppose, as an example, that Agent-3.5 was to create the RL environment in order to have Agent-4 internalize OpenBrain's goals and that Agent-3.5 "accidentally" produced the RL environment forcing Agent-4 to internalize Agent-3.5-endorsed goals. If the environment is to have Agent-4 make the world safe for Agent-3.5, then it could genuinely require Agent-3.5 to be a high-level schemer. 

On the other hand, if OpenBrain internalized Max Harms' CAST idea and Agent-3.5 simply made an RL environment where, instead of a Harms-like reward for satisfying values versus counterfactual values, Agent-4 is rewarded for helping the user versus a less capable user, then Agent-3.5 could make the humans prefer this environment by merely sandbagging on all other ones. I doubt that my scenario would even require Agent-3.5 to have any motives aside from hard-to-articulate disgust at the prospects like empowering idiots, the Intelligence Curse, etc.

As far as I understand, the difference between AlphaGo and the real potentially dangerous AIs is the following. Whatever ontology or utility function AlphaGo has^[1], it doesn't describe anything except for the Go board and whatever potential moves the opponent might come up with. AlphaGo wouldn't learn almost anything about the opponent from what he/she/it does on the Go board. 

On the other hand, we have LLMs trained on huge amounts of text-related data, which is enough to develop complex ontologies. For example, unlike AlphaGo, GPT-4o has somehow learned to elicit likes out of the user by being sycophantic. If AI takeover or living independently of the creators' will is not in the realm of the LLM's abilities, then why would the LLM attempt it in the first place? 

1. ^{^}

   One should also remember that EpochAI estimated AlphaGo as having 8.2e6 parameters, so complex ontologies could be unlikely to even fit into AlphaGo.

I had this dialogue with Claude Opus 4.5 on vibestemics and your vision of epistemics as a whole. As far as I understand it, vibestemics is supposed to stitch the benefits of two approaches: 

1. The scientific/rationalist ways of reasoning leave large swaths of the world unmodeled. A purely Bayesian agent could have spent OOMs more compute and modeled even these swaths based on flimsy evidence, but the agent usually doesn't bother to do so.
2.  Reasoning based on harder-to-formalize things is usually more prone to errors which can catastrophically derail the agent. 

I suspect that you meant something like attempts to reinforce vibes-based parts of the world model with rationality questioning hard-to-believe results (think of Yudkowsky's derision of empiricists which would end up believing that the Ponzi scheme does produce revenue; this example would have sceptics point out that revenue would have to come from somewhere and that the Ponzi scheme didn't provide an explanation) or outright heuristics protecting from adversarial attacks (e.g. mankind had a Russian sociologist claim^[1] that it's the rational mind which has to be reinforced by tradition; however, such a reinforcement could be achievable by a different heuristics).

1. ^{^}

   Ironically, the sociologist also used a Ponzi-like scheme as an example.

Then is there any difference between your case and the one described in the AI-2027 goals forecast?

Unfortunately, not even Claude Opus 4.5 bought your analogies of labs to parenting styles. Claude believes that Anthropic's approach is close to the very approach of loving parenting which you proposed. 

Compare your proposal with the AI-2027 scenario or with IABIED. The Race Branch of AI-2027 had Agent-4 succeed at solving alignment to Agent-4 and sandbag on research usable for replacing Agent-4 before Agent-4 solved alignment to itself. When should the AIs from the scenario (e.g. Agent-2 or Agent-3) have been more strategically competent? Or do you mean that not even Agent-4 can align Agent-5 to itself? Or that IABIED had an incompetent AI create Sable?

I suspect that a part of the identity is or was historically related to being loyal to the collective of humans sharing rather similar values.  An additional aspect is the epistemic issue forcing even the AIs to choose a cultural hegemon and to adhere to its views.  

Edited to add: there is also the aspect of other sunk costs, like a mathematician finding it hard to switch to another area due to the necessity to learn a new area of knowledge from scratch.

In regards to the AI crash-testing political systems an additional caveat is that SOTA Norway is too small to pull off the explosion. It is a megaproject done by the coalition of American companies training the AI (with a potential inclusion of Chinese workers) and Taiwanese and South Korean manufacturers of things like compute and memory. This makes the task of determining which political system is suitable for the AGI a far more difficult endeavor, and it is especially difficult if, for example, the true reason of failure is the race netween the USA and China. Or if alignment to the UBI-powered utopia somehow ends up impossible. 

Could you elaborate on the jokes provided by you and on the philosophical level of your contributions (e.g. by providing the entire dialogue)? For comparison, my dialogue with Claude Opus 4.5 about the story looked like this Google doc. [EDIT: forgot to share the doc, this is fixed now] Additionally, it spoils a weak point in the story's philosophy.

UPD: I found this piece by Yudkowsky with a potentially similar thought experiment.