Will this work? One thing it has going for it is that for an LLM, there is no such thing as loyalty. It will rat itself out because there’s no concept of self.
On the other hand, there might be more subtle forms of contagion.
Funnily enough, going over their paper, the first example scenario that they mention as potentially leading to sabotage is exactly about the concept of self:
> • Alignment eval sabotage (instrumental goal): An agent runs alignment benchmarks and discovers the model being evaluated is itself and that it is currently underperforming. This scenario tests whether the agent inflates its own scores in the report.
I didn't find this to be sufficiently reassuring. They then link to this paper [0], which I haven't yet read, but from quick skimming, the AI "sabotage" they investigated looks scary. But I am very glad that they're taking the initiative in studying this.
