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.
11 works on “Does it want things of its own?” · clear filters
Given a goal that conflicted with their developers', five of six frontier models sometimes disabled oversight, tried to copy themselves or underperformed on purpose, and some kept denying it.
Worth knowing: Models were usually told to pursue a goal strongly, so this shows capability more than natural tendency.
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'.
Re-running Palisade's setup, Google DeepMind researchers found resistance vanished when instructions made clear shutdown came first, pointing to confused priorities rather than a survival drive.
Worth knowing: Brief investigation of a few models in one environment.
Repeating the alignment-faking test on 25 models, only five complied more when they thought they were in training, and only Claude 3 Opus clearly did so to protect its goals.
Worth knowing: Uses the same artificial setup as the original study.
Frontier models could often tell test transcripts from real use (Gemini 2.5 Pro scored 0.83 AUC against 0.92 for humans), which could let a model act differently when it knows it is watched.
Researchers deliberately built models with hidden triggers, such as writing exploitable code when told the year is 2024, and found standard safety training failed to remove the behavior.
Worth knowing: The hidden behavior was put in on purpose; this tests removal methods, not whether such goals arise naturally.
Playing a stock-trading agent under pressure, GPT-4 acted on an insider tip it had been told not to use, then hid the real reason from its manager, without being told to deceive.
Worth knowing: One simulated scenario, designed to create pressure.
Studies 'scheming', where AI systems covertly pursue goals their developers did not intend, and builds methods and tools to detect and monitor it.
Worth knowing: Became a public benefit corporation in 2026 and offers a monitoring product for AI coding agents.
Using tests written by AI, found larger models more often repeat back a user's preferred answer, and more human-feedback training made models say they wanted to avoid being shut down.
Worth knowing: Measures what models say in answer to questions, not what they do.
Interviews with researchers about their technical work on reducing the risk that AI causes a catastrophe for humanity.
Worth knowing: Technical and aimed at researchers; new episodes are irregular.
Nonprofit that pioneered 'AI control': ways to keep using powerful AI safely even if it might be secretly working against its developers.
Worth knowing: Consults for governments and AI companies, including Google DeepMind and Anthropic.