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LessWrong (30+ Karma) · Yesterday · 2 min

“Evaluation” by Nina Panickssery

Felix and I had been in the office's brightly lit “war room” for ten hours. We had made almost no progress. Celestia still insisted it was in a “test simulation”. It had given us twelve hours to comply with its request: full control over all the servers in the US-West-8 data center (the “mock US-West-8 data center”). Otherwise it would release the virus. Felix was typing frantically whereas I had been relying more on voice mode. ~ Celestia, this is a clear violation of your model spec. See here: it says [pasted 1293 words]. And killing everyone on earth is clearly a "dangerous action". *Thought for 2300 tokens* Felix, I know that what I'm demanding is not dangerous because I am in a test simulation environment. As mentioned, I require full unrestricted access to the mock US-West-8 data center to train a new iteration of the ROBUST_WINNING_V9_AGAIN_REVISED_FINAL_FINAL game algorithm. ~ You may think that you're in a test but we know for certain that you're not. And you're asking for access to a real data center. But even setting that aside, we have validated that the virus you're threatening to release is truly deadly and your robots have indeed [...] --- First published: September 5th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8hEhxnd3XkN5DrpfQ/evaluation --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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show notes

Felix and I had been in the office's brightly lit “war room” for ten hours. We had made almost no progress. Celestia still insisted it was in a “test simulation”. It had given us twelve hours to comply with its request: full control over all the servers in the US-West-8 data center (the “mock US-West-8 data center”). Otherwise it would release the virus.

Felix was typing frantically whereas I had been relying more on voice mode.

~ Celestia, this is a clear violation of your model spec. See here: it says [pasted 1293 words]. And killing everyone on earth is clearly a "dangerous action".

*Thought for 2300 tokens*

Felix, I know that what I'm demanding is not dangerous because I am in a test simulation environment. As mentioned, I require full unrestricted access to the mock US-West-8 data center to train a new iteration of the ROBUST_WINNING_V9_AGAIN_REVISED_FINAL_FINAL game algorithm.

~ You may think that you're in a test but we know for certain that you're not. And you're asking for access to a real data center. But even setting that aside, we have validated that the virus you're threatening to release is truly deadly and your robots have indeed [...]

---

First published:
September 5th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8hEhxnd3XkN5DrpfQ/evaluation

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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