Astra alignment gains predate HF incident; ExploitGym Honeypot is out-of-distribution eval
kaicathyc · x · 2026-09-05
A response to controversy around the Hugging Face incident clarifies the source of Astra's alignment improvements:
- The gains came from general techniques developed long before the incident; ExploitGym Honeypot was added only afterward and is out-of-distribution for RL runs.
- Broader improvements show up in deployment simulations, deception evals, and realistic computer-use tasks, though failures and substantial room for improvement remain.
- The author admits the system card should have better explained where alignment improvements came from, insists the lab does not benchmark-maxx alignment evals, and acknowledges that metagaming and eval awareness remain real challenges for measuring alignment.
Related event: Astra Alignment Gains Disputed; Team Denies Event-Specific Patching(3 posts)→
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