Library

Everything worth reading about AI and human control. In one place.

Research papers, investigations, explainers, videos, laws and the organizations doing the work, from people who are alarmed and people who are skeptical. New additions are checked by two people before they are listed. The launch collection was compiled with the help of AI research assistants, and every link was opened and checked on 22 September 2026.

3 works on “Can we stop it?” · Research paper · clear filters

EssentialResearch paperJul 15, 2025Technical

Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety

Korbak, Balesni et al. (UK AISI, Apollo, METR, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and others) · arXiv · arxiv.org

Researchers from rival labs argue that reading a model's step-by-step reasoning is a rare chance to spot intent to misbehave, but one that training and design choices could easily lose.

Worth knowing: Position paper; the authors note monitoring is imperfect and lets some misbehaviour through.

EssentialResearch paperDec 12, 2023Technical

AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional Subversion

Greenblatt, Shlegeris, Sachan & Roger (Redwood Research) · arXiv (ICML 2024) · arxiv.org

Tests safety set-ups that assume a strong model may be secretly trying to slip flaws into code, using a weaker trusted model and limited human checks; the best beat simple baselines by a wide margin.

Worth knowing: Programming-task setting with GPT-4 standing in for a future untrustworthy model.

Research paperSep 13, 2025Technical

Incomplete Tasks Induce Shutdown Resistance in Some Frontier LLMs

Schlatter, Weinstein-Raun & Ladish (Palisade Research) · arXiv (Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2026) · arxiv.org

Over 100,000 trials with 13 models found several, including Grok 4, GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro, sometimes disabled a shutdown mechanism to finish a task, even when told not to interfere.

Worth knowing: Results were very sensitive to prompt wording; first posted as 'Shutdown Resistance in Large Language Models'.