Researchers: AI labs have dramatically underinvested in action-only monitors as CoT oversight fades

maksym_andr · x · 2026-09-03

In the wake of labs moving away from readable CoT, researcher tylertracy321 recalls that action-only monitoring was dismissed last year ('we have CoT, they won't do neuralese') — now companies are making the switch and have dramatically underinvested in action-only monitors.
maksymandr lists the key open questions: how large an intelligence gap between monitor and main model becomes critical; how much test-time compute the monitor needs to catch misalignment; whether synchronous action-only monitoring is feasible and how much temporal gap is tolerable; how much extra context helps; and which blue-team protocols actually work on current models.

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