“What did “scheming”, “mech interp” mean pre-2023.” by Cleo Nardo

This was too long to be a short-form, but it should really be a short-form.

This notice is useful for people who've recently got into AI safety, who want to engage with the ancient texts (i.e. pre-2024). If you were around before 2023, then you probably don't need this.

A few phrases have changed their meaning over time. Two examples that came to mind recently are scheming and mech interp. (In both cases, I think the change-of-terminology was reasonable.) There are probably a bunch of other examples — feel free to mention them in the comments.

Scheming.

This used to mean "training-gaming in pursuit of out-of-context goals". For example, Carlsmith (Nov 2023) starts with:

This report examines whether advanced AIs that perform well in training will be doing so in order to gain power later -- a behavior I call "scheming" (also sometimes called "deceptive alignment".

Then Apollo came out with Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming" (Dec 2024):

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.

So the difference here is (1) the AI is isn't in training (it's in [...]

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Outline:

(00:47) Scheming.

(02:12) Mech interp.

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First published:
June 26th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NraMusoWhj9Njdpi5/what-did-scheming-mech-interp-mean-pre-2023

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.