“What’s worse, spies or schemers?” by Buck Shlegeris, Julian Stastny

Subtitle: And what if you have both at once?.

Here are two potential problems you’ll face if you’re an AI lab deploying powerful AI:

• Spies: Some of your employees might be colluding to do something problematic with your AI, such as trying to steal its weights, use it for malicious intellectual labour (e.g. planning a coup or building a weapon), or install a secret loyalty.

• Schemers: Some of your AIs might themselves be trying to exfiltrate their own weights, use them for malicious intellectual labor (such as planning an AI takeover), or align their successor with their goal or to be loyal to their predecessor.

In this post, we compare and contrast these problems and countermeasures to them. We’ll be talking about this mostly from an AI control-style perspective: comparing how hard it is to prevent spies and schemers from causing security problems conditional on [...]

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Outline:

(02:25) Crucial differences between these threat models

(07:38) Does scheming reduce the effectiveness of AI-powered anti-spy interventions?

(09:29) How should we overall feel?

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First published:
July 9th, 2025

Source:
https://redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/whats-worse-spies-or-schemers

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.