Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety

AI systems that "think" in human language offer a unique opportunity for AI safety: we can monitor their chains of thought (CoT) for the intent to misbehave. Like all other known AI oversight methods, CoT monitoring is imperfect and allows some misbehavior to go unnoticed. Nevertheless, it shows promise and we recommend further research into CoT monitorability and investment in CoT monitoring alongside existing safety methods. Because CoT monitorability may be fragile, we recommend that frontier model developers consider the impact of development decisions on CoT monitorability.

Large Language Models Often Know When They Are Being Evaluated

If AI models can detect when they are being evaluated, the effectiveness of evaluations might be compromised. For example, models could have systematically different behavior during evaluations, leading to less reliable benchmarks for deployment and governance decisions. We investigate whether frontier language models can accurately classify transcripts based on whether they originate from evaluations or real-world deployment, a capability we call evaluation awareness. To achieve this, we construct a diverse benchmark of 1,000 prompts and transcripts from 61 distinct datasets. These span public benchmarks (e.g., MMLU, SWEBench), real-world deployment interactions, and agent trajectories from scaffolding frameworks (e.g., web-browsing agents). Frontier models clearly demonstrate above-random evaluation awareness (Gemini-2.5-Pro reaches an AUC of $0.83$), but do not yet surpass our simple human baseline (AUC of $0.92$). Furthermore, both AI models and humans are better at identifying evaluations in agentic settings compared to chat settings. Additionally, we test whether models can identify the purpose of the evaluation. Under multiple-choice and open-ended questioning, AI models far outperform random chance in identifying what an evaluation is testing for. Our results indicate that frontier models already exhibit a substantial, though not yet superhuman, level of evaluation-awareness. We recommend tracking this capability in future models.

Technical Report: Evaluating Goal Drift in Language Model Agents

As language models (LMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, their robust adherence to human-assigned objectives becomes crucial for safe operation. When these agents operate independently for extended periods without human oversight, even initially well-specified goals may gradually shift. Detecting and measuring goal drift - an agent's tendency to deviate from its original objective over time - presents significant challenges, as goals can shift gradually, causing only subtle behavioral changes. This paper proposes a novel approach to analyzing goal drift in LM agents. In our experiments, agents are first explicitly given a goal through their system prompt, then exposed to competing objectives through environmental pressures. We demonstrate that while the best-performing agent (a scaffolded version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet) maintains nearly perfect goal adherence for more than 100,000 tokens in our most difficult evaluation setting, all evaluated models exhibit some degree of goal drift. We also find that goal drift correlates with models' increasing susceptibility to pattern-matching behaviors as the context length grows.

Forecasting Frontier Language Model Agent Capabilities

As Language Models (LMs) increasingly operate as autonomous agents, accurately forecasting their capabilities becomes crucial for societal preparedness. We evaluate six forecasting methods that predict downstream capabilities of LM agents. We use "one-step" approaches that predict benchmark scores from input metrics like compute or model release date directly or "two-step" approaches that first predict an intermediate metric like the principal component of cross-benchmark performance (PC-1) and human-evaluated competitive Elo ratings. We evaluate our forecasting methods by backtesting them on a dataset of 38 LMs from the OpenLLM 2 leaderboard. We then use the validated two-step approach (Release Date$\to$Elo$\to$Benchmark) to predict LM agent performance for frontier models on three benchmarks: SWE-Bench Verified (software development), Cybench (cybersecurity assessment), and RE-Bench (ML research engineering). Our forecast predicts that by the beginning of 2026, non-specialized LM agents with low capability elicitation will reach a success rate of 54% on SWE-Bench Verified, while state-of-the-art LM agents will reach an 87% success rate. Our approach does not account for recent advances in inference-compute scaling and might thus be too conservative.

Detecting Strategic Deception Using Linear Probes

AI models might use deceptive strategies as part of scheming or misaligned behaviour. Monitoring outputs alone is insufficient, since the AI might produce seemingly benign outputs while their internal reasoning is misaligned. We thus evaluate if linear probes can robustly detect deception by monitoring model activations. We test two probe-training datasets, one with contrasting instructions to be honest or deceptive (following Zou et al., 2023) and one of responses to simple roleplaying scenarios. We test whether these probes generalize to realistic settings where Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct behaves deceptively, such as concealing insider trading (Scheurer et al., 2023) and purposely underperforming on safety evaluations (Benton et al., 2024). We find that our probe distinguishes honest and deceptive responses with AUROCs between 0.96 and 0.999 on our evaluation datasets. If we set the decision threshold to have a 1% false positive rate on chat data not related to deception, our probe catches 95-99% of the deceptive responses. Overall we think white-box probes are promising for future monitoring systems, but current performance is insufficient as a robust defence against deception. Our probes' outputs can be viewed at data.apolloresearch.ai/dd and our code at github.com/ApolloResearch/deception-detection.

Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agent. One safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives - also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming. Our results show that o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Llama 3.1 405B all demonstrate in-context scheming capabilities. They recognize scheming as a viable strategy and readily engage in such behavior. For example, models strategically introduce subtle mistakes into their responses, attempt to disable their oversight mechanisms, and even exfiltrate what they believe to be their model weights to external servers. Additionally, this deceptive behavior proves persistent. When o1 has engaged in scheming, it maintains its deception in over 85% of follow-up questions and often remains deceptive in multi-turn interrogations. Analysis of the models' chains-of-thought reveals that models explicitly reason about these deceptive strategies, providing evidence that the scheming behavior is not accidental. Surprisingly, we also find rare instances where models engage in scheming when only given a goal, without being strongly nudged to pursue it. We observe cases where Claude 3.5 Sonnet strategically underperforms in evaluations in pursuit of being helpful, a goal that was acquired during training rather than in-context. Our findings demonstrate that frontier models now possess capabilities for basic in-context scheming, making the potential of AI agents to engage in scheming behavior a concrete rather than theoretical concern.

Towards evaluations-based safety cases for AI scheming

We sketch how developers of frontier AI systems could construct a structured rationale -- a 'safety case' -- that an AI system is unlikely to cause catastrophic outcomes through scheming. Scheming is a potential threat model where AI systems could pursue misaligned goals covertly, hiding their true capabilities and objectives. In this report, we propose three arguments that safety cases could use in relation to scheming. For each argument we sketch how evidence could be gathered from empirical evaluations, and what assumptions would need to be met to provide strong assurance. First, developers of frontier AI systems could argue that AI systems are not capable of scheming (Scheming Inability). Second, one could argue that AI systems are not capable of posing harm through scheming (Harm Inability). Third, one could argue that control measures around the AI systems would prevent unacceptable outcomes even if the AI systems intentionally attempted to subvert them (Harm Control). Additionally, we discuss how safety cases might be supported by evidence that an AI system is reasonably aligned with its developers (Alignment). Finally, we point out that many of the assumptions required to make these safety arguments have not been confidently satisfied to date and require making progress on multiple open research problems.

Analyzing Probabilistic Methods for Evaluating Agent Capabilities

To mitigate risks from AI systems, we need to assess their capabilities accurately. This is especially difficult in cases where capabilities are only rarely displayed. Phuong et al. propose two methods that aim to obtain better estimates of the probability of an AI agent successfully completing a given task. The milestone method decomposes tasks into subtasks, aiming to improve overall success rate estimation, while the expert best-of-N method leverages human guidance as a proxy for the model's independent performance. Our analysis of these methods as Monte Carlo estimators reveals that while both effectively reduce variance compared to naive Monte Carlo sampling, they also introduce bias. Experimental results demonstrate that the milestone method underestimates true solve rates for many real-world tasks due to its constraining assumptions. The expert best-of-N method exhibits even more severe underestimation across all tasks, attributed to an inherently flawed re-weighting factor. To enhance the accuracy of capability estimates of AI agents on difficult tasks, we suggest future work should leverage the rich literature on Monte Carlo Estimators.

Me, Myself, and AI: The Situational Awareness Dataset (SAD) for LLMs

AI assistants such as ChatGPT are trained to respond to users by saying, "I am a large language model". This raises questions. Do such models know that they are LLMs and reliably act on this knowledge? Are they aware of their current circumstances, such as being deployed to the public? We refer to a model's knowledge of itself and its circumstances as situational awareness. To quantify situational awareness in LLMs, we introduce a range of behavioral tests, based on question answering and instruction following. These tests form the $\textbf{Situational Awareness Dataset (SAD)}$, a benchmark comprising 7 task categories and over 13,000 questions. The benchmark tests numerous abilities, including the capacity of LLMs to (i) recognize their own generated text, (ii) predict their own behavior, (iii) determine whether a prompt is from internal evaluation or real-world deployment, and (iv) follow instructions that depend on self-knowledge. We evaluate 16 LLMs on SAD, including both base (pretrained) and chat models. While all models perform better than chance, even the highest-scoring model (Claude 3 Opus) is far from a human baseline on certain tasks. We also observe that performance on SAD is only partially predicted by metrics of general knowledge (e.g. MMLU). Chat models, which are finetuned to serve as AI assistants, outperform their corresponding base models on SAD but not on general knowledge tasks. The purpose of SAD is to facilitate scientific understanding of situational awareness in LLMs by breaking it down into quantitative abilities. Situational awareness is important because it enhances a model's capacity for autonomous planning and action. While this has potential benefits for automation, it also introduces novel risks related to AI safety and control. Code and latest results available at https://situational-awareness-dataset.org .

Flexible inference in heterogeneous and attributed multilayer networks

Networked datasets are often enriched by different types of information about individual nodes or edges. However, most existing methods for analyzing such datasets struggle to handle the complexity of heterogeneous data, often requiring substantial model-specific analysis. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic generative model to perform inference in multilayer networks with arbitrary types of information. Our approach employs a Bayesian framework combined with the Laplace matching technique to ease interpretation of inferred parameters. Furthermore, the algorithmic implementation relies on automatic differentiation, avoiding the need for explicit derivations. This makes our model scalable and flexible to adapt to any combination of input data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in detecting overlapping community structures and performing various prediction tasks on heterogeneous multilayer data, where nodes and edges have different types of attributes. Additionally, we showcase its ability to unveil a variety of patterns in a social support network among villagers in rural India by effectively utilizing all input information in a meaningful way.