Situational awareness and self-awareness evals — SR2025 Agenda Snapshot

One-sentence summary: Evaluate if models understand their own internal states and behaviors, their environment, and whether they are in a test or real-world deployment.

Theory of Change

If an AI can distinguish between evaluation and deployment (“evaluation awareness”), it might hide dangerous capabilities (scheming/sandbagging). By measuring self- and situational-awareness, we can better assess this risk and build more robust evaluations.

Broad Approach

behaviorist science

Target Case

worst-case

Orthodox Problems Addressed

Superintelligence can fool human supervisors, Superintelligence can hack software supervisors

Key People

Jan Betley, Xuchan Bao, Martín Soto, Mary Phuong, Roland S. Zimmermann, Joe Needham, Giles Edkins, Govind Pimpale, Kai Fronsdal, David Lindner, Lang Xiong, Xiaoyan Bai

Funding

frontier labs (Google DeepMind, Anthropic), Open Philanthropy, The Audacious Project, UK AI Safety Institute (AISI), AI Safety Support, Apollo Research, METR

Estimated FTEs: 30-70

Critiques

Lessons from a Chimp: AI “Scheming” and the Quest for Ape Language, It’s hard to make scheming evals look realistic for LLMs

See Also

sandbagging-evals, various-redteams, Model psychology

Outputs in 2025

11 item(s) in the review. See the wiki/summaries/ entries with frontmatter agenda: situational-awareness-and-self-awareness-evals (these were generated alongside this file from the same export).

Source

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

Related Pages

• ai-safety
• ai-safety
• sandbagging-evals
• various-redteams
• agi-metrics
• ai-deception-evals
• ai-scheming-evals
• autonomy-evals
• capability-evals
• other-evals
• self-replication-evals
• steganography-evals
• wmd-evals-weapons-of-mass-destruction

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]]