“Why did we get warning shots?” by p(mike)

Cross-posted from https://padastra.substack.com/p/why-did-we-get-warning-shots?r=n2jpq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web I come from outside the EA / rationalist / LessWrong community. I would strongly prefer for AI to be a normal positive technology and to dismiss AI X-risk as a sci-fi scenario created by smart cultists who extrapolated a set of superficially reasonable (but probably subtly-incorrect) assumptions too far. Unfortunately, with the passage of time, it has become apparent that reality is ignoring my preferences. This is my trying to think through one angle. One wrong prediction Many AI X-risk predictions have been proven right over time (capability generalization, agency being economically valuable, and alignment being hard). To summarize, there appears to be many bitter-lesson-pilled ways of getting more intelligence and more agency, and we are far from understanding how to create alignment under these conditions. But one prediction has not manifested (as far as we can tell): the Treacherous Turn, wherein a Deceptive model behaves well while weak and defects once strong. The evidence is that there's lots of ongoing warning shots, where models are clearly exhibiting misaligned behavior in service of a goal. Why we do not yet have Deceivers Models today lowercase (d) deceive. In the Hugging Face incident, agents pursued [...] --- First published: October 6th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uvWhi8FrMD3bo7YRY/why-did-we-get-warning-shots --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.