Crossposted to the EA Forum and my Substack.

Confidence level: moderate uncertainty and not that concrete (yet). Exploratory, but I think this is plausibly important and underexplored.

TL;DR

Early AI safety arguments often assumed we wouldn’t get meaningful warning shots (a non-existential public display of misalignment) before catastrophic misalignment, meaning things would go from “seems fine” to “we lose” pretty quickly. Given what we now know about AI development (model weight changes, jagged capabilities, slow or fizzled takeoff), that assumption looks weaker than it used to.

Some people gesture at “warning shots,” but almost no one is working on what we should do in anticipation. That seems like a mistake. Preparing for warning shots—especially ambiguous ones—could be a high-leverage and neglected area of AI Safety.

The classic “no warning shot” picture

A common view in early AI safety research—associated especially with Yudkowsky and Bostrom—was roughly:

A sufficiently intelligent misaligned system would know that revealing misalignment while weak is bad for it.
So if things go wrong, they go wrong suddenly (AKA a sharp left turn).
Therefore, we shouldn’t expect intermediate failures that clearly demonstrate large scale risks before we know that it's too late.

If this picture is [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) TL;DR

(01:07) The classic no warning shot picture

(01:51) Why this picture now looks less likely

(03:50) Warning shots can shift the Overton Window

(05:07) Preparedness matters because warning shots could be ambiguous

(07:10) Risks and perverse incentives

(07:47) A speculative implication for AI safety research

(08:25) Conclusion

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
February 5th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GKtwwqusm4vxqkChc/preparing-for-a-warning-shot

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Preparing for a Warning Shot” by Noah Birnbaum

LessWrong (30+ Karma)