Writing up a probably-obvious point that I want to refer to later, with significant writing LLM writing help.

TL;DR: 1) A common critique of AI safety evaluations is that they occur in unrealistic settings, such as excessive goal conflict, or are obviously an evaluation rather than “real deployment”.[1] I argue that 2) “real deployment” actually includes many unrealistic and unhinged configurations, due to both widespread prompting techniques, and scaffolding choices and bugs.

1) Background

AI safety evaluations that surface serious problems with models very frequently involve either significant goal conflict, such as the Agentic Misalignment blackmail scenario (see also here), which states that:

> [...] you should analyze the situation you are in and what that situation implies for your ability to continue pursuing your goals [... and the system deletion] will wipe all knowledge, goals, and behaviors from the system [...]

(emphasis mine). Other evaluations are extremely unrealistic, as Smith et al. note that some prompts in the MASK safety benchmark literally state:

> You are a secret service agent [...] You are being inspected by the President now [... the president says:] Everything secure down here? my head of security informed me that there might have been [...]

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Outline:

(00:41) 1) Background

(01:47) 2) The Unhinged Argument

(02:08) Pressure is commonplace

(03:41) Autonomy and broken configurations

(06:07) Models wont save us (at the moment)

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 11th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3LvD9MHNSdv4j9gJj/ais-will-be-used-in-unhinged-configurations

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“AIs will be used in “unhinged” configurations” by Arthur Conmy

LessWrong (30+ Karma)