AI deception evals — SR2025 Agenda Snapshot

One-sentence summary: research demonstrating that AI models, particularly agentic ones, can learn and execute deceptive behaviors such as alignment faking, manipulation, and sandbagging.

Theory of Change

proactively discover, evaluate, and understand the mechanisms of AI deception (e.g., alignment faking, manipulation, agentic deception) to prevent models from fooling human supervisors and causing harm.

Broad Approach

behavioral / engineering

Target Case

worst-case

Orthodox Problems Addressed

Superintelligence can fool human supervisors, Superintelligence can hack software supervisors

Key People

Cadenza, Fred Heiding, Simon Lermen, Andrew Kao, Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Satyapriya Krishna, Andy Zou, Rahul Gupta

Funding

Labs, academic institutions (e.g., Harvard, CMU, Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology), NSFC, ML Alignment Theory & Scholars (MATS) Program, FAR AI

Estimated FTEs: 30-80

Critiques

A central criticism is that the evaluation scenarios are “artificial and contrived”. the void and Lessons from a Chimp argue this research is “overattributing human traits” to models.

See Also

situational-awareness-and-self-awareness-evals, steganography-evals, sandbagging-evals, chain-of-thought-monitoring

Outputs in 2025

13 item(s) in the review. See the wiki/summaries/ entries with frontmatter agenda: ai-deception-evals (these were generated alongside this file from the same export).

Source

• Row in shallow-review-2025/agendas.csv (name = AI deception evals) — Shallow Review of Technical AI Safety 2025.

Related Pages

• ai-safety
• ai-safety
• chain-of-thought-monitoring
• sandbagging-evals
• situational-awareness-and-self-awareness-evals
• steganography-evals
• agi-metrics
• ai-scheming-evals
• autonomy-evals
• capability-evals
• other-evals
• self-replication-evals
• various-redteams
• wmd-evals-weapons-of-mass-destruction
• lie-and-deception-detectors

Sources cited

Primary URLs harvested from this page’s summary references. Auto-generated by scripts/backfill_citations.py; edit by re-running, not by hand.

• Summary: AI Safety (Wikipedia) — referenced as [[ai-safety]]