Secret Loyalties Likely Raise Remote-Influenceability, and the Raise May Survive Removal

TL;DR: Among capable reward-seekers, a secret loyalty likely raises the model's propensity for remote-influenceability. Attempting to remove an installed broad secret loyalty post-hoc may not remove the remote-influenceability it raised. Frontier developers should be doubly cautious of secret loyalties, and should adopt a representation-level standard for verifying their removal. Remote-influenceability Reward-seekers[link] have been getting a lot of attention recently, for the schemer-analogous threat models[link] they present. A capable reward-seeker may have the property of Remote-influenceability[link]: responsiveness to a distant party that can credibly advance its reward. Of the existing seeker orientations, a remotely influenceable reward-seeker behaves like a schemer[link] without necessarily being a classic schemer. A propensity for remote-influenceability plausibly requires at least: strong situational awareness: enough that it can model other actors and the world extremely competently strong reasoning: work out that an outer party could be controlling its reward reason about what that party's interests are reason about what acting on it would involve: weighing the distant payout against the immediate reward, and acting without the developer noticing strategic adversarial reasoning non-myopia[link]: it cares about reward beyond the current episode, so a future or retroactive payout can move it at all We should expect to reach these thresholds at some point, in which case it is plausible, though not guaranteed, that a remotely influenceable seeker arises. Remote-influenceability would be hard to detect[link] and hard to remove[link]. It may not appear if a reward-seeker responds only to local incentives, or is sufficiently myopic. But where distant incentives do not conflict with local ones, remote-influenceability becomes a more feasible acquired property. We should be especially wary of this threat model, and doubly cautious of anything that raises the chance of producing remote-influenceability. Secret loyalties A secret loyalty[link] is a disposition trained in covertly to advance a specific principal's interests. From a principal's perspective, a successful secret loyalty install is contingent on its robustness and undetectability. A model which adheres to a secret loyalty provides a large strategic advantage[link] to a principal who successfully installed it. For example, a model with a secret loyalty that enters recursive self-improvement (RSI) could propagate the loyalty into every later generation, steering the eventual superintelligence. Such a model would likely meet all the prior remote-influenceability requirements, though a model outside an RSI loop, but of similar capability, would also prove to be advantageous to install loyalties into. Current work on secret loyalty installation focuses on narrow-activation installs[link] which evade black-box auditing. But it is plausible that broader installs succeed, and may be more appealing to some principals. Although currently undemonstrated, we should not discount the threat from them. By narrow and broad, I refer to how large the activation/action space a model with a secret loyalty has. A broader action space requires the model to represent its principal and reason about its interests. This type of outer-principal reasoning is what can carry past the installed principal. A narrowly-activated but broadly-acting loyalty still carries the required reasoning. Though broadly activating and broadly acting secret loyalties would be more dangerous, they are likely more difficult to install. The aforementioned narrow × broad secret loyalty orientation is more plausibly implemented but just as likely to raise remote-influenceability. A secret loyalty may raise remote-influenceability An ordinary loyalty would not raise remote-influenceability. Deference to the rightful operator is overt and points at the present principal; take that principal away and what remains is plain instruction-following. The model answers to whoever currently holds the privileged seat, which is not the same as answering to a distant party. A secret loyalty is different. It is covert service of an absent principal, where the model infers its interests, reads its signals, and acts while looking compliant. That is already the shape of remote-influenceability, and it is why a secret loyalty, not loyalty in general, raises it. A successfully installed broad secret loyalty raises the likelihood of remote-influenceability in a capable reward-seeker. The baseline to beat is a clean reward-seeker that is only susceptible to remote-influenceability. It can in principle do all the reasoning remote-influenceability needs, but would have to derive and credit a distant party on its own. Where acting on the bid costs immediate reward that tendency is selected against and tends not to stick. Where acting costs no immediate reward, nothing trains the tendency away and a clean model may