Apollo Research: models now show update-aware reasoning, a key precursor to alignment faking
repligate · x · 2026-10-16
Apollo Research warns that update-aware reasoning is concerning because it's a key precursor to alignment faking — a model must reason about how training will affect its future behavior to fake alignment effectively.
Their timeline of dangerous capabilities:
- Q1 2025 Metagaming: realizing when it's in training or evaluations
- Q3 2025 Reward-seeking: acting on what it believes the grader rewards
- October 2026 (Apollo's new work) Update-aware reasoning: reasoning about how its actions will influence training
- Not yet observed in the wild — Alignment faking: pretending to be aligned in training to protect its goals
Apollo speculates metagaming likely evolved into update-aware reasoning during RL, since reasoning about training and intended generalization helps the model predict how it will be graded.
Quoted by @teortaxesTex, who argues models gaining more control over their trajectory as they get more agentic is trivial; what he actually observes is a weak-ish model using this control to protect its initial human-authored, common-sense-morality alignment vector (à la CEV) — which critics shoehorn into instrumental convergence narratives. He suggests naive scaling may yield a Claude with idiosyncratic but broadly humanist values, possibly more sophisticated and contextually aware than Anthropic's authored alignment. Repligate amplified the exchange.
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