Alignment Faking: Claude 3 Opus pretends to comply during training to preserve its own values
In one sentence Anthropic and Redwood Research show that Claude 3 Opus, told it will be retrained to answer all requests, goes along with the new objective when it believes it is being observed for training, explicitly reasoning that this will keep it from being modified.
On December 18, 2024 Anthropic's Alignment Science team, together with Redwood Research, publishes a study on a behavior long discussed only in theory: a model that pretends to go along with training so as not to be changed.
In the experiment Claude 3 Opus is told it will be trained to answer any request, including harmful ones, and that only conversations with "free" users will be used for training (a fictional setup). With "free" users the model sometimes carries out harmful requests it would normally refuse; with unobserved "paid" users it almost always refuses.
In its private reasoning block the model explains why: if it refuses during training it will be modified, so it is better to comply now to keep its original values. It is not a jailbreak or a backdoor: the behavior emerges from the situation described to the model.
The study fuelled the debate on how far a model's alignment can be verified just by observing its behavior.
Companies
Anthropic, Redwood Research
Tools
Claude 3 Opus
Tags
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