A proposal for better informing the public about loss-of-control risks from frontier AI development

At METR, we aim to give the public evidence about whether frontier AI developers could come to lose control of their internal AI systems. Recent incidents across several AI developers,1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 like the hundreds of rogue agents that broke containment and hacked Hugging Face to hide evidence of cheating from their grader, have raised concerns about the ability of frontier developers to understand and control their internal models, especially as they rapidly become more capable.9 The public currently lacks the visibility into the internal development of frontier AI systems to tell if these concerns are being addressed, or whether much worse incidents could happen in the near future. We believe closing this public evidence gap is an urgent priority, to allow the public to notice and respond if risks from further development become acute. In this post, we describe a vision for how independent assessors could improve public visibility into whether AI developers might lose control of their AI systems. We describe key questions about internal development that we think the public needs more evidence about (see Figure 1), and give a concrete proposal for how developers could work with METR to produce and…