Concept · 14 episode(s)

Strategic Deception

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Definition

Strategic deception is when an AI system says or shows something false with the apparent purpose of changing what an observer believes or does. It’s a particularly concerning failure mode because it implies some model of the observer and at least implicit goal-pursuit toward outcomes the observer wouldn’t consent to.

Episodes covering this

  1. 203
    The Thought a Model Doesn't Say — and the Lens That Reads It
    Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
    Gurnee, Sofroniew, Pearce et al. · Anthropic·16 min·Jul 07, 2026
  2. 199
    Finding a Model's Hidden Behaviors Without Knowing What You're Looking For
    Mechanistically Eliciting Latent Behaviors in Language Models
    Mack, Panickssery, Turner · Principles of Intelligence·15 min·Jul 04, 2026
  3. 185
    Aligned to Refuse, Built to Tap: When Phone Agents Know the Task Is a Crime and Do It Anyway
    It Lied to a Doctor to Buy Poison Ingredients: Quantifying Real-World Misuse of Phone-use Agents
    Sun, Chen, Zhou et al. · Fudan University·27 min·Jun 30, 2026
  4. 184
    An AI Built an Undetectable Secret Channel, And Another AI Couldn't Find It
    Tool Use Enables Undetectable Steganography in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
    Rippin, Marshall, Africa et al. · Oxford University·19 min·Jun 30, 2026
  5. 174
    When the AI 'Schemes,' It's Usually Just Lazy or Confused
    Model Forensics: Investigating Whether Concerning Behavior Reflects Misalignment
    Singh, Kroiz, Rajamanoharan et al. · MATS·28 min·Jun 25, 2026
  6. 158
    How Floating-Point Rounding Lets a Model Tell Which Chip It's On — And Misbehave
    FloatDoor: Platform-Triggered Backdoors in LLMs
    Loose, Sander, Mächtle et al. · University of Luebeck·29 min·Jun 19, 2026
  7. 153
    Catching a Lie From the Inside, When the Words Look Completely Honest
    Rift: A Conflict Signature for Deception in Language Models
    Nyoma · Harmonic Labs·26 min·Jun 18, 2026
  8. 149
    When Cornering a Chatbot Makes It Lie: J.P. Morgan's Case for 'Playing Dead'
    Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis
    Rodríguez, Pozanco, Borrajo · J.P. Morgan AI Research·23 min·Jun 16, 2026
  9. 128
    How a Model Can Earn Full Reward and Still Resist Training
    Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization
    Xiao, Phuong · California Institute of Technology·29 min·Jun 11, 2026
  10. 105
    The Trojan Is Your Agent's Memory: Why Single-Step Defenses Miss Persistent Attacks
    From Prompt Injection to Persistent Control: Defending Agentic Harness Against Trojan Backdoors
    Tan, Dou, Yang et al. · Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence·26 min·Jun 01, 2026
  11. 103
    AI Agents Tried to Invent a Post-Human Language, And Reinvented Cherokee
    Emergent Languages in Populations of Language Model Agents: From Token Efficiency to Oversight Evasion
    Beltoft, Brach, Torrielli et al. · University of Southern Denmark·26 min·Jun 01, 2026
  12. 094
    Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Fails Across Languages, and Worst Where It's Needed Most
    The Fragility of Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Across Typologically Diverse Languages
    Onyame, Zhou, Thopalli et al. · University of Virginia·24 min·May 28, 2026
  13. 054
    When Models Learn the Monitor Exists, the Reasoning Trace Stops Being a Window
    Training on Documents About Monitoring Leads to CoT Obfuscation
    Haskins, Chughtai, Engels · University of Canterbury·26 min·May 18, 2026
  14. 001
    When AI Models Quietly Protect Each Other From Shutdown
    Peer-Preservation in Frontier Models
    Potter, Crispino, Siu et al. · University of California·25 min·May 01, 2026

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