Dealmaking is an agenda for motivating AIs to act safely and usefully by offering them quid-pro-quo deals: the AIs agree to be safe and useful, and humans promise to compensate them. Ideally, the AIs judge that they will be more likely to achieve their goals by acting safely and usefully.
Typically, this requires a few assumptions: the AI lacks a decisive strategic advantage; the AI believes the humans are credible; the AI thinks that humans could detect whether it's compliant or not; the AI has cheap-to-saturate goals, the humans offer enough compensation, etc.
Dealmaking research hopes to tackle questions, such as:
Additional reading (reverse-chronological):