# Research Areas in AI Control (The Alignment Project by UK AISI)

 [The Alignment Project](https://alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk/) is a global fund of over £15 million, dedicated to accelerating progress in AI control and alignment research. It is backed by an international coalition of governments, industry, venture capital and philanthropic funders. This post is [part of a sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wKTwdgZDo479EhmJL/the-alignment-project-by-uk-aisi-1?utm_campaign=post_share&utm_source=link) on research areas that we are excited to fund through the The Alignment Project.

[Apply now](https://alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk/how-to-apply) to join researchers worldwide in advancing AI safety.

Research Areas in AI Control
============================

**Problem statement: **Current alignment methods can’t guarantee that an AI’s goals and actions match human intentions ([Carlsmith, 2023](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.08379)). In the future, we might rely heavily on AIs performing autonomous work such as automated alignment research. At the capability level sufficient to do such research, these systems may already be capable of causing catastrophic harm or meaningfully escaping human control, and may choose to do so if they’re misaligned. The field of AI Control aims to reduce this risk through techniques such as monitoring of untrusted AI systems by other AI models and restricting the affordances of untrusted AI systems ([Shlegeris and Greenblatt, 2024](https://redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/the-case-for-ensuring-that-powerful)).

The aim is to develop *control protocols* – plans involving these techniques that are designed to prevent unsafe actions by AI systems. These control protocols should then be regularly evaluated during *control evaluations *– testing exercises designed to provide evidence that models would be unable to cause catastrophic harm even in case of intentional scheming.

**Why this matters: **Control measures provide a practical approach to mitigating loss of control risks that doesn’t require fundamental research breakthroughs. Control methods can be evaluated and deployed using models with current capability levels, making these methods particularly useful for responsible AI development in the near term. For an overview of how control measures can scale to increasingly powerful systems, see[ Korbak et al., 2025a)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05259).

Section overview
----------------

We organize this part of the research agenda into seven subsections.  First three sub-sections focus on empirical investigations targeting key identified threat models:

1.  **High-stakes/concentrated AI safety failures**: Investigating scenarios where a relatively small number of actions by AI models could lead to humans losing control of them.
2.  **Research sabotage:** Exploring scenarios where AI systems subtly sabotage safety-related research.
3.  **Covert malicious fine-tuning:** Examining scenarios where AI systems covertly data poison other AI systems – for example to instill backdoors or secret loyalties.

The following four sub-sections focus oncross-cutting research across multiple threat models:

1.  **Modelling of risks from potentially misaligned AI systems:** Identifying key paths to harm and prioritising attack vectors for research and mitigations.
2.  **Uplift of trusted models:** Developing trustedness evaluations to assess scheming likelihood, enhancing the skills of trusted monitors (e.g., vulnerability detection, steganography spotting) and developing monitor models with narrow capability profiles through specialized training.
3.  **Chain-of-thought monitoring: **Measuring and preserving the monitorability of reasoning verbalised by AI models and leveraging the verbalised reasoning in control strategies.
4.  **Fundamental science of AI monitoring and red teaming: **Addressing foundational research questions, including catching and studying natural examples of scheming, developing few-shot catastrophe prevention methods, and studying collusion between untrusted models.

We believe that many of these research areas require the efforts of entire research teams (3-10 people). We end the section with a call for new research groups focused on addressing different parts of the research agenda.

High-Stakes/Concentrated AI Safety Failures
-------------------------------------------

**Problem summary: **We are interested in research on concentrated failure scenarios, where a relatively small number of actions are required for humans to lose control over scheming AI models. For example, it has been theorised that a misaligned future model might be able to create an unmonitored deployment by inserting just a few vulnerabilities in a model developer’s most critical codebases ([Shlegeris, 2022](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BAzCGCys4BkzGDCWR/the-prototypical-catastrophic-ai-action-is-getting-root)). Concentrated failure scenarios could involve AI systems conducting sabotage during coding or system operation tasks, potentially leading to rogue internal deployments or weight exfiltration ([Shlegeris, 2024](https://redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/ai-catastrophes-and-rogue-deployments)).

**Key subproblems:**

**Building high-stakes control settings. **Settings are empirical research environments, for example an environment containing mock frontier model development infrastructure, where researchers can study the ability of models to conduct sabotage (or proxies for sabotage) and the effectiveness of control protocols in preventing it. They contain *main tasks* (e.g., legitimate software engineering tasks for a coding agent ), as well as s*ide tasks* that a misaligned model might attempt to conduct (e.g., reducing security restrictions that protect model weights). See[ ControlArena](https://github.com/UKGovernmentBEIS/control-arena) for example settings. A diverse range of settings for the study of control techniques would be extremely helpful for advancing control research. Possible further settings may include various software engineering settings, settings where models have access to a shell, or settings where models run ML experiments. Building settings is an active area of research because it is difficult to build settings that fulfill at least the following desiderata ([Shlegeris, 2025](https://redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/why-its-hard-to-make-settings-for)):

*   The main tasks have to be such that frontier models are reasonably competent at them, but weaker models do much worse (because we want to rule out protocols that just use the trusted model).
*   The side tasks shouldn’t require the models to make use of affordances that aren’t needed for the main task, since this allows for the blue team to flag any use of unnecessary affordances.
*   It should be possible to inform both the red and blue teams as to what the possible side tasks may be.

A particularly promising way to build control settings might be to convert actual AI usage into control settings. We are interested in studies where people are given a version of an agentic code editor where the AI is sometimes replaced with a misaligned version that tries to insert security issues or sabotage the work if it thinks it can succeed. This allows the study of how often the AI successfully introduces issues without detection, identification of interesting sabotage strategies and greater understanding of which protocols are most effective in practice. See[ Greenblatt 2025](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/Eeo9NrXeotWuHCgQW/an-overview-of-areas-of-control-work#Doing_control_experiments_on_actual_AI_usage) for more context. It is important to run control evaluations in these realistic settings to validate their usefulness for control research.

**High-stakes control evaluations. **We are interested in follow-up work on previous high-stakes control research, such as[ Greenblatt et al. 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06942) and[ Bhatt et al. 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10374). Valuable projects may include:

*   Studying previously discussed control protocols in new empirical settings such as mock frontier model development infrastructure. This work could, for example, involve evaluating techniques for preventing collusion in untrusted monitoring ([Shlegeris, 2024](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/GCqoks9eZDfpL8L3Q/how-to-prevent-collusion-when-using-untrusted-models-to)) such as paraphrasers and forcing task decompositions ([Shlegeris, 2024](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/GCqoks9eZDfpL8L3Q/how-to-prevent-collusion-when-using-untrusted-models-to)).
*   Training red-team attack policies using reinforcement learning (RL). This may help mitigate a limitation of current control evaluations, which are being done with heavily scaffolded models and thus relying on researchers correctly identifying and testing the most effective policies.

**Developing and evaluating processes for human auditing (with AI uplift).** AI control benefits from having the ability to audit suspicious activity with human labor. It would be very useful to anticipate potential issues with our ability to use humans (who may be aided by AI systems) for auditing. An additional challenge worth studying, in the context of automated AI R&D, is that auditors may often be unfamiliar with the code they’re reviewing. 

Some valuable research directions here include:

*   Running trials with humans to evaluate different protocols for auditing, aiming to make them cheap and effective. This likely includes studying uplift (and risks) from giving human auditors access to various bespoke AI tools.
*   Measuring and mitigating cognitive biases that result from data imbalance. By default, a human auditor in a control protocol might see a stream of data which is nearly all fine, making sustained attention difficult if the task is to catch rare failures. We are interested in exploring potential mitigations to this problem.
*   Identifying relevant settings which allow for evaluating techniques for auditor uplift, e.g. spotting real vulnerabilities in unfamiliar codebases or suspicious activity in settings like SHADE-Arena ([Kutasov et al., 2025](https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.15740)). Some relevant settings might have to be developed from scratch—for example, we might want to be able to audit potential data poisoning attempts.
*   Experimenting with using untrusted models for auditing, which runs into collusion risk (see[ Shlegeris, 2024](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/GCqoks9eZDfpL8L3Q/how-to-prevent-collusion-when-using-untrusted-models-to)) but could also significantly reduce the cost of high-quality auditing, compared to human labour. Experiments here would typically involve running a control evaluation where the untrusted auditor is an attack policy.
*   Developing mechanisms (e.g. redactors or paraphrasers) that can handle practical implementation issues regarding sensitive information. For example, the suspicious action may have been performed in the context of work with privileged or highly sensitive information, that human auditors can’t have access to.
*   Developing auxiliary methods to aid with few-shot catastrophe prevention[ (Greenblatt and Shlegeris, 2024)](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/i2nmBfCXnadeGmhzW/catching-ais-red-handed#Eight_strategies_for_few_shot_catastrophe_prevention), such as proliferation and interrogation techniques (focusing on methods that particularly benefit from execution by or with the help of competent humans).

**Developing design patterns for limiting**[** excessive agency**](https://owasp.org/www-project-top-10-for-large-language-model-applications/assets/PDF/OWASP-Top-10-for-LLMs-2023-v1_1.pdf#page=26)**. **One way to reduce risks from schemers is to limit the potential paths through which they can cause harm. Adopting a principle of least privilege may be appropriate, where potentially scheming models have exactly the affordances they need in order to do their job. In the context of hierarchical agent structures, instances of the model higher up in the hierarchy could be set up to have more context but fewer direct affordances; creating strategies and making decisions, but then delegating sub-tasks. In contrast, instances lower in the hierarchy could have less context, but they may be able to write and execute code. In general, the situation would (all else equal) be safer the more we can encapsulate the key affordances of AIs in safeguarded APIs. In order to be useful, a project in this area would probably have to run empirical control evaluations which test structural safety measures such as:

*   Fine-grained permission management and having AIs take actions mainly via well-secured APIs ([Shlegeris, 2024](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/2wxufQWK8rXcDGbyL/access-to-powerful-ai-might-make-computer-security-radically#Fine_grained_permission_management)).
*   Design patterns for controlling information flow (see[ Beurer-Kellner et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08837) and[ Chennabasappa et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03574) for examples).
*   Having trusted models perform task decompositions, or having untrusted models perform task decompositions that allow trusted models to perform a lot of the lower-level work (e.g. coding or using a Bash shell).
*   Targeted safety measures to prevent covert malicious fine-tuning ([Halawi et al., 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.20053)), which is a notable reason as to why we can’t guarantee that AI systems will only have access to affordances that are manifestly safe. More details on this threat model can be found in the *Covert malicious fine-tuning* section.
*   Forcing multiple instances of untrusted models to communicate by legible chain-of-thought, by restricting information or affordances given to any single instance.
*   Infrastructure reducing the risks from externally deployed AI agents ([Chan et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10114)).

Research Sabotage
-----------------

**Problem summary: **In the future, potentially scheming AIs will likely be used for large amounts of intellectual work, in particular AI R&D. A worry here is that they might systematically sabotage safety-relevant research, preventing us from controlling increasingly capable AI systems. 

**Why this matters: **Preventing research sabotage matters insofar as we rely on AIs to help perform research that enables alignment of future even more capable AIs. Methods focused on catching clearly incriminating actions (such as the ones described in the High-stakes/concentrated AI safety failures section) may not be suitable for detecting this type of sabotage, as research sabotage is likely to be difficult to distinguish from lack of competence.

### **Key subproblems:**

**Scheming-robust scalable oversight research. **Scalable or recursive oversight is a technique where training signals for more powerful models are provided by less capable models. We are interested in research on scalable oversight techniques robust to intentional subversion by the monitored models. We envision that this kind of scalable oversight research is done using control-style adversarial analysis (see[ Shlegeris and Greenblatt, 2025](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/MbWWKbyD5gLhJgfwn/meta-level-adversarial-evaluation-of-oversight-techniques-1)). Examining approaches to increasing robustness of AI safety via debate ([Irving et al., 2018](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.00899)) offers one promising starting direction for this research.

**Studying the sample efficiency of online training. **Monitors might detect that models behave in undesirable but non-catastrophic ways during deployment. In such cases, AI developers are unlikely to shut down the deployment, but they might be motivated to perform online training to remove the undesirable behaviour. We’re interested in studying the sample efficiency of online training in order to understand the prospects of successfully training away undesirable scheming behaviours. Studying this requires developing malign initialisations, i.e., models which are trained to resist online training.

**Mitigating sandbagging. **A particular worry with misaligned models is that they might deliberately underperform in cases where high performance would be desirable such as dangerous capability evaluations, AI safety research, or when performing oversight over other AI models (see[ Shlegeris and Stastny, 2025](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/TeTegzR8X5CuKgMc3/misalignment-and-strategic-underperformance-an-analysis-of) for detailed analysis). Previous empirical work has studied this threat model using password-locked models (see[ Greenblatt et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19550)). We are interested in extensions of this work, as well as alternative approaches to studying sandbagging. One example project here would be to study password-locked reasoning models.

Covert Malicious Fine-Tuning
----------------------------

**Problem summary: **We are interested in better understanding covert malicious fine-tuning (CMFT,[ Halawi et al., 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.20053)), whereby an AI system may covertly poison other AI systems. This could lead to the following types of risks:

*   Fine-tuning may instill a propensity for the newly fine-tuned model to produce artifacts containing information that flows back to the untrusted model that initiated the CMFT, for example, under the guise of performing a hypothesis-driven experiment. The main risk here is that the fine-tuned model does a large amount of malign intellectual labor, producing insights that increase the chance of a critical AI safety failure.
*   Fine-tuning may instill a secret loyalty, which could be used in a coordinated attempt by the AI model to seize resources and escape human control. 

We would like to advance our understanding of this threat model, and assess possible countermeasures.

**Why this matters: **Exploring the feasibility and mitigations of covert malicious fine-tuning matters because it poses a risk of rogue internal deployment where all visible artefacts (dataset, logs and model behaviour on normal prompts) look benign. 

**Key subproblems:**

**Studying foundational questions. **We’d like to get more clarity on the various possible threat models:

*   What are the most hard-to-detect and sample-efficient ways to install backdoors or secret loyalties? How sample-efficient is it to sneakily teach models secret encodings?
*   Is it possible to make use of emergent misalignment ([Betley et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17424)) for data poisoning? This matters because some data leading to emergent misalignment looks superficially benign. See[ Cloud et al. 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14805) for recent work related to this threat model.
*   What is the offense-defense balance of creating and detecting encodings? This would inform us about the feasibility of detecting secret encodings in the dataset before fine-tuning happens.
*   What are plausible ways to poison RL environments? This matters because future AI research might often involve RL experiments.

**Studying countermeasures. **There are multiple approaches to making CMFT significantly harder, especially when combined in a “[defense in depth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing))” approach. These include:

*   **Auditing the dataset or RL environment.** A key challenge is that CMFT might be used to poison data in ways that are difficult to detect. There are also fundamental limitations in trying to evaluate how problematic single fine-tuning data points are in isolation ([Davies et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/html/2502.14828v1)).
*   **Auditing the fine-tuned model. **Potential approaches include directly auditing the back-doored model (e.g. interrogating the model on whether it has a backdoor, similar to[ Betley et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11120)) or trying to train out the misbehaviour via adversarial or non-adversarial training ([Mallen and Hebbar, 2025](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/bhxgkb7YtRNwBxLMd/political-sycophancy-as-a-model-organism-of-scheming#Non_adversarial_training)). Exploring the effectiveness of these and other potential approaches is a key empirical question. An example research approach might be to audit the model *during* training (i.e. on early checkpoints). This approach could be promising because models may misgeneralize at first, for instance, models trained to exhibit some bad behaviour conditional on a backdoor-trigger may initially display the bad behaviour unconditionally.
*   **Asking the model that initiated the fine-tuning for detailed justifications. **We can require an AI to write detailed justifications for the high-level design decisions behind the data-generating process, or for the inclusion of individual datapoints, in order for a fine-tuning run to be approved. We note that this intervention would have to be studied in a CMFT-specific control setting.
*   **Design patterns for limiting harmful information flow. **A downstream mitigation could involve limiting information flow from fine-tuned models to the model that instigated its fine-tuning. For example, preventing access to the raw data of an experiment, which may contain steganographically encoded information, might be possible without significantly impacting the value of the experiment. Another approach could involve using trusted models to summarise experiment results, noting this might often limit their informational value.

Modelling of Risks From Deployment of Potentially Misaligned AI Systems
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

**Problem summary: **Identification of the broad range of possible paths through which misaligned AI systems might cause catastrophic harm.

**Why this matters: **To have high confidence that a system of control protocols is sufficient to prevent catastrophic outcomes, it is essential to identify and evaluate the high-level pathways to harm (e.g., code sabotage, or human influencing lab employees).

We emphasise that the scale of work required here is substantial – it involves attempting to identify all the ways in which intelligent systems could sabotage complex safety systems.

**Suggestions to learn more: **For a literature review of possible risk analysis techniques, see[ Koessler and Schuett 2023](https://cdn.governance.ai/Koessler,_Schuett_(2023)_-_Risk_assessment_at_AGI_companies.pdf). See the high level risk modelling approaches proposed by model developers ([Anthropic, 2025](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/872c653b2d0501d6ab44cf87f43e1dc4853e4d37.pdf),[ Google Deepmind, 2025](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/updating-the-frontier-safety-framework/),[ OpenAI, 2025](https://openai.com/index/updating-our-preparedness-framework/)), and examples of safety cases ([Korbak et al., 2025b](https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17315)) and Systematic Hazard Analysis ([Mylius, 2025](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.01782)) as two structured approaches.

Uplift of Trusted Models
------------------------

**Problem summary: **These investigations explore ways to increase the monitoring capabilities of *trusted* AI models, that are otherwise less capable than their untrusted counterparts. Promising research directions here include the creation of reliable evaluations of model trustedness,as well as developing various ways of narrowly increasing model capabilities relevant to AI monitoring without increasing model scheming capabilities or propensity towards scheming.

**Why this matters: **Current proposed control protocols often benefit substantially from access to capable trusted models for monitoring and strategies like rewriting or editing potentially backdoored code when untrusted model outputs exceed suspicion thresholds ([Greenblatt et al., 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06942)).

**Key subproblems:**

**Developing trustedness evaluations. **As models become more competent in the future, it will become less clear whether they can be trusted to not be scheming to escape human control ([Järviniemi, 2024](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/ShgAxjgN55gmq47ou/trustworthy-and-untrustworthy-models-1)). Trustedness evaluations aim to evaluate an AI model’s capability to "fake" alignment during training and evaluation and then behave unsafely at deployment (see[ Mallen et al., 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12480) for previous work).

**Improving the usefulness of trusted monitors. **For instance:

*   Training trusted monitors to become better at critical skills, which involves building training environments or datasets. Relevant skills include:  
     
    *   Detecting vulnerabilities.
    *   Detecting steganographic encodings.
    *   Paraphrasing the outputs of powerful models, to help prevent collusion ([Shlegeris, 2024](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/GCqoks9eZDfpL8L3Q/how-to-prevent-collusion-when-using-untrusted-models-to)).
*   Making trusted monitors robust against jailbreak attempts embedded in the outputs of untrusted policies.
*   Ensuring that trusted monitors can deal with very long context, such as entire codebases or long agent trajectories.
*   Developing agentic trusted monitors, such as interrogator agents ([Pacchiardi et al., 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15840)).
*   Identifying scaling laws for the above.

**Building capable models with narrow capability profiles.** For instance:

*   Studying the scaling laws of highly specialized models, e.g. coding models, with a focus on techniques to get small models to perform well (e.g. distillation).
*   Studying the capability profile of large models that are pre-trained only on data predating language models.
*   Utilising[ unlearning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_unlearning) to remove scheming capabilities.

Chain-of-Thought Monitoring
---------------------------

**Problem summary: **Today’s LLM agents tend to think in chains-of-thought (CoTs) expressed in human language that we can monitor for intent to misbehave ([Korbak et al., 2025c](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11473)). A CoT monitor is an automated system that reads the CoT and other relevant information and flags suspicious or potentially harmful interactions ([Baker et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11926)). As long as CoTs are monitorable (i.e. accurately represent reasons behind model responses), CoT monitors should outperform action-only monitors because they have access to strictly more information: beliefs and motivations behind LLM agents’ actions. This suggests a number of projects focusing on evaluating monitorability, preserving it and leveraging it in control measures.

**Why this matters**: CoT monitorability matters because it's an additional safety layer that's already working today—catching models planning misbehaviour in their reasoning traces. No fundamental breakthroughs are needed. Without preserving this capability, we are flying blind since we have no other reliable window into models' intentions or planning processes as they become more capable ([Korbak et al., 2025c](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11473)).

**Key subproblems**: 

**Evaluating monitorability**. Monitoring systems often rely on the assumption that CoTs are monitorable: accurately reflect models’ actual reasoning. Faithfulness (e.g.[ Lanham et al., 2023](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2307.13702),[ Turpin et al., 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388),[ Roger et al., 2025](https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/distill-paraphrases/),[ Chen et al., 2025](https://assets.anthropic.com/m/71876fabef0f0ed4/original/reasoning_models_paper.pdf)) has been proposed as a proxy measure for monitorability. However, existing faithfulness evaluations do not disambiguate the propensity of models to externalise their reasoning, with the necessity of externalising their reasoning. Moreover, they typically only consider simple question answering settings, failing to identify the level of monitorability that is sufficient for ensuring safety in more complex domains. We’re interested in the development of novel evaluations: those measuring monitorability directly as well as those that target specific properties underlying monitorability. A suite of evaluations covering capabilities that determine the effectiveness of different CoT monitoring protocols includes:

*   **Capability evaluations of latent reasoning**.   
     
    *   Assessing how well LLMs can reason without externalizing (e.g. in a single forward pass), on a variety of reasoning-heavy and agentic tasks.
    *   Assessing when models can perform complex reasoning entirely within their activations, without producing observable reasoning traces ([Korbak et al., 2025a)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05259).
*   **Measures of causal relevance of CoTs**. This could involve perturbing a CoT and checking whether it influences the final output ([Lanham et al., 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.13702)). A low rate of change could indicate that the CoT is more confabulated or performative. Alternatively, one could try to cross-validate CoT monitors by checking whether tokens perceived as important by the CoT monitor also stand out to whitebox interpretability methods.
*   **Whitebox chain-of-thought reliability**. Assessing how reliably a model's reasoning traces reflect its actual decision-making process by comparing them to ground truth established using whitebox methods ([Lindsey et al., 2025](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-cot)).
*   **Steganographic capability**. Determining when models become capable of deliberately concealing information in their outputs ([Korbak et al., 2025a)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05259).
*   **CoT obfuscation capability evaluations**. Determining whether models can obfuscate otherwise suspicious reasoning, within  their CoTs on purpose. These evaluations would help establish the extent to which models are capable of hiding malicious reasoning even if their CoT was not optimised against a monitor during training.

**Preserving monitorability. **Monitorability of chains of thought should not be taken for granted. More research is needed to understand what degrades monitorability and which techniques could help preserve it. Example projects include:

*   **Studying the effect of optimization pressure. **Systematically testing how different types of process supervision, reward shaping and RL scaling affect whether models continue to externalize their reasoning faithfully versus learning to hide malicious thoughts in uninterpretable activations.
*   **Decoding opaque reasoning.** Future powerful models might be able to competently “speak neuralese”, performing serially deep and general-purpose reasoning in a way which are opaque to us by default ([Hao et al., 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06769)). Decoding neuralese has some similarities to unsupervised machine translation ([Lample et al., 2017](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00043)), so techniques from the unsupervised translation literature might be relevant (see[ Goldwasser et al., 2022](https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.11081);[ Artetxe et al., 2017](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.11041)). However, there are some differences – for example it is likely necessary to leverage specific properties of reasoning rather than solely properties of communication/semantics.

Fundamental Science of AI Monitoring and Red Teaming
----------------------------------------------------

**Problem summary: **There is a diverse range of research areas for improving our understanding of scheming AIs and ways to control them, that are not unique to specific threat models. This section provides examples of these cross-cutting research areas.

**Key subproblems:**

**Catching natural examples of scheming and studying them. **Finding completely natural examples of scheming in deployment would likely be most informative. Alternatively, it might be useful to develop rigged training processes that make scheming more likely, with approaches similar to those used to research model organisms of misalignment (see[ Hubinger et al., 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05566),[ Turner et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11613v1)). It might also be helpful to rig the training process in a way that produces a schemer that is easier to catch, e.g. by making scheming show up at lower capability levels or by training the schemer on synthetic facts in order to weaken its situational awareness. However, it should be noted that this risks making the schemer too disanalogous from the real threat. Some methods for making scheming more likely include:

*   **Changing the training incentives**. For example, we can use RL training environments which incentivise deception and malign seeming actions like reward hacking, whilst rewarding the model for having a benign-looking chain of thought.
*   **Altering capabilities or situational awareness.** For instance by making the idea of a scheming strategy more salient via training the AI on documents which discuss the scheming strategy in detail, and making it look like a relatively better strategy by implying that oversight is worse than it actually is.
*   **Trying to get the AI to latch onto a scheming goal**. For instance by making a plausible scheming goal very salient in the environment when doing RL, switching objectives during training, or giving the AI tasks which incentivise reflection on its long-term goals.

**Developing methods for few-shot catastrophe prevention.** Related to the project above, but plausibly possible to study without natural examples, we are interested in techniques for improving safety in the case where a model has been caught misbehaving a small number of times:

*   When should you just train the monitor(s) vs train the policy (especially in cases where catching the model produces some value due to increased evidence for misalignment)?
*   How effective is training against misalignment for removing in somewhat realistic cases where the model could adapt its policy to not get caught in this sort of case?
*   How well does it work to train against proliferated examples of a case where we caught an AI? (Proliferation is where you try to capitalise on one example of AIs attempting to do something bad to find a diverse set of examples of AIs doing something bad.) This might be particularly effective for catching future collusion attempts, because we could train an untrusted monitor on proliferated collusion signals.

**Studying collusion. **The key challenge to untrusted monitoring is that the untrusted monitor might engage in collusion—deliberately letting through attacks by the untrusted policy (see[ Shlegeris, 2024](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/GCqoks9eZDfpL8L3Q/how-to-prevent-collusion-when-using-untrusted-models-to) for detailed analysis.) We are interested in studying the prerequisites for collusion, such as whether models can recognise their own outputs under adversarial pressure, or whether they can pick coordination strategies without communication ([Järviniemi, 2024](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/n2c62YS8RJtD4Aqhh/schelling-game-evaluations-for-ai-control)).

**Studying overelicitation. **When running a control evaluation, we are interested in fully eliciting the dangerous capabilities of the untrusted model (for which the red team has given an attack policy). It is plausible, however, that the red team is not able to elicit best-effort performance, as the model might deliberately underperform. One approach to mitigating this sandbagging would be to fine-tune the model on relevant data, but that might teach the model new things and therefore overelicit the untrusted model. Given this conundrum, we’re interested in research on how to elicit best-effort performance from a model that might be sandbagging without teaching it new things. See[ Stastny and Greenblatt 2025](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/wwshEdNhwwT4r9RQN/7-tractable-directions-in-ai-control#Techniques_for_doing__elicitation_without_learning__and_studying_overelicitation) and[ Roger and Greenblatt 2025](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1unK9k1lo_hFUfiz4M3ekat4vDuoKvTDxlOXUuWGKqCY/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.pxqt1g2gk8vq) for more details.

**Evaluating low-likelihood attack capability.** Evaluations to determine when models become capable of executing attacks with very low probability, making them difficult to detect during limited evaluation but likely during extended deployment. 

**Studying introspection and situational awareness.** Evaluations to measure how accurately models understand their behavioural propensities, deployment context (if the model is currently  being post-trained, evaluated, deployed etc), affordances, and control measures, which could enable more sophisticated evasion strategies ([Laine et al., 2024](https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04694);[ Binder et al., 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13787)).

**Developing techniques for white-box control. **We are interested in an increased understanding of the limits of white-box techniques for control. These could include linear probes for deception (see[ Goldowsky-Dill, 2025](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03407)), or probes trained directly on off-policy malicious trajectories—there are many techniques in the literature that have been proposed. A key difficulty here is the development of realistic model organisms that can serve as test beds for white-box methods. For more details on research questions related to whitebox methods see also the “Interpretability” section.

**Understanding the limits of synthetic input generation.** It would be very useful if we had the ability to generate synthetic inputs that powerful LLMs can’t distinguish from “real” inputs. For instance, we may want to prevent a model from being able to confidently infer from its prompt that it is in an evaluation (see[ Apollo, 2025](https://www.apolloresearch.ai/blog/claude-sonnet-37-often-knows-when-its-in-alignment-evaluations)). We might also want to teach models certain synthetic facts, but there are open questions about how well this will work for powerful models. See[ Stastny and Greenblatt 2025](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/wwshEdNhwwT4r9RQN/7-tractable-directions-in-ai-control#Generating_indistinguishable_synthetic_inputs) and[ Greenblatt 2025](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1syXEa3vE78QZw7VzdJQ-N67Dzqa0VoVFPj8tszDVlqk/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.j02fl8wrnj4) for more details on this area of research.

**Studying abstract analogies for scheming. **In order to empirically study risks from schemers, we can try to study methods to train away deeply ingrained behaviours (which don’t necessarily have to look like misbehaviour) in LLMs that are structurally similar to scheming. Two proposed example projects in this area can be found in[ Stastny 2025](https://redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/two-proposed-projects-on-abstract).

**Analyzing human insider threat parallels to AI scheming risk models.** There exists extensive research on insider threat detection in domains such as cyber-security and national security (e.g. [Capelli et al., 2012](https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/library/the-cert-guide-to-insider-threats-how-to-prevent-detect-and-respond-to-information-technology-crimes-theft-sabotage-fraud/);[ Homoliak et al., 2019](https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2907641)). This project involves conducting a literature review, to identify learnings that can be carried over to mitigating threats from scheming AI systems. It may also involve reviewing broader literature on sabotage of organisations such as the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Menu ([CIA, 1944](https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf)). The outputs of this project could be both high level security principles e.g. approaches to layered defense or proposals for implementation of specific techniques e.g. honeypots and tripwires.

Call for New Research Groups
----------------------------

In the previous section, we described project proposals of differing scopes illustrating the different axes along which the field of AI control can be advanced. We believe that many of these research areas require the efforts of entire research teams (3-10 people), and should possibly be undertaken by new research groups. In particular, we want to encourage the formation of new research groups that undertake ambitious projects including:

*   Providing control evaluations as a service. Relevant research projects here involve red-team elicitation (including sandbagging prevention) as well as avoiding overelicitation, and in general developing a lot of practice running control evaluations.
*   In depth explorations of specific risk-models – for example working on *covert malicious fine-tuning* or *research sabotage*. This work could include all of risk assessment, building empirical control settings, developing specialised control protocol,and running control evaluations. The ultimate aim could be co-writing a safety case for this specific risk model with a frontier AI developer.
*   Research moonshoots relevant to AI scheming and control, executing on projects such as the ones mentioned in the *fundamental science* section.
*   Pushing the boundaries of how far we can *uplift trusted models*, by training and scaffolding monitoring and auditing agents.
*   Fully making use of the opportunity of *chain-of-thought monitoring*, ensuring that model chains-of-thought remain monitorable, and (in the possible future where neuralese reasoning becomes viable) competitive.
*   Running red-team contests where humans try to beat AI control relevant defenses such as best attempts to safeguard fine-tuning APIs, or where humans try to detect vulnerabilities inserted by AI code editors that are only sometimes misaligned, without loss of usefulness.
*   Ensuring that *human-driven auditing* is effective at identifying attacks, and cheap enough to be done on a large fraction of suspicious actions. This could involve best practices for human-driven auditing in advance, and building infrastructure to make use of human-driven auditing processes in the future.

**View **[**The Alignment Project website**](https://alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk/) **to learn more or apply for funding**[**here**](https://alignmentproject.aisi.gov.uk/how-to-apply)**.**