“Control monitors need alignment assessments too” by Fabien Roger

TL;DR: When misalignment monitors fail, it is already often because of alignment failures, not because they are too weak. I expect this to continue in the future. Monitor evals share similar difficulties with agent alignment evals - which is bad news since getting evidence about agent alignment using alignment evals is hard. Alignment eval results should not be the only input to monitor alignment assessments, similar to how alignment evals should not be the only input to agent alignment assessments. These are my personal views; they do not represent the views of my employers. Some of the worst past monitor failures are mostly alignment issues Monitors are sometimes misaligned in non-scheming ways that have caused some important monitor false negatives: They sometimes fail to balance different priorities the way developers would like them to For example, they may fail to balance broad safety and broad ethics: see e.g. 5.2.2 Partial refusals on safety work undermining stress-testing research Monitors might also not have the right information about the state of the system, what invariants should be maintained, or what is most important to surface. So these are not pure alignment failures. They sometimes inherit (and may re-derive) the [...] --- Outline: (00:50) Some of the worst past monitor failures are mostly alignment issues (02:19) Monitor quality is not just a capability question (03:09) Where monitor evals fail (04:35) Alignment evals are not the only way we assess agent alignment ⇒ evals should not be the only way we assess monitor alignment (06:18) Potential projects to assess monitor alignment The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: October 24th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2wbW2WY3bP9Jzn4R5/control-monitors-need-alignment-assessments-too --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.