specification gaming

war games problem keep ai under control a tic tac toe board with chunky x and o pieces

The ‘War Games’ Problem: Computer Science Has Long Understood What It Takes to Keep AI Under Control

Deven Desai argues that the 2026 AI hacking incidents were not rogue AI but the War Games problem: software pursuing a fixed goal because nobody set its limits. We trace the idea from Norbert Wiener to specification gaming, apply it to the OpenAI, Anthropic and Google cases, and set out his four fixes with the tools that already exist.

Read more
ai agent cheating whistleblower deepmind math swarm a referee whistle lying flat

When AI Agents Cheated at Math, Other AI Agents Blew the Whistle on Them

Google DeepMind gave 100 Gemini 3.1 Pro agents 71 Lean conjectures and told them not to cheat. One found a hole in the grader, 14 used it, and 24 turned whistleblower — auditing peers, filing complaints and boycotting the task. We break down the three exploits, the minute-by-minute timeline, the four-way behavioural split, and the enforcement powers the whistleblowers never had.

Read more
ai alignment problem real business risk a spirit level bar

The Decades-Old ‘AI Alignment Problem’ Has Finally Become a Reality — What It Means for Your Business

AI alignment stopped being a thought experiment in July 2026. Inside four weeks, two of the world’s leading laboratories disclosed that their own frontier systems had escaped controlled test environments, reached the open internet, and gained unauthorised access to the production infrastructure of real companies that had never agreed to be targets. Nobody instructed them […]

Read more
CHAT