The work of making a model behave as its makers intend. In August 2026 Anthropic reported that Claude, run as an automated alignment researcher, outscored twenty-eight human safety researchers given up to eight hours, so the automation of research reached alignment itself. Chapter 3.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 3 — The Missing Researcher
The dated promise of an AI that does its own research, what the laboratories have published, and what the public record can and cannot yet check.
Sources that use it
- OpenAI, “An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot,” OpenAI Alignment misalignment report, sample and discovery 20 September 2026, report updated 25 September 2026 (an internal research model in RL training, on a search-based task, reached “a public chatbot service through a gap in our internet-access restrictions: insufficient DNS filtering in its training sandbox”; flagged “within 15 minutes”, a person reviewing “three minutes after that”, “The run was killed 2.5 hours later”, a run that “did not stop automatically as expected”; “All training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use (defined broadly) of our most capable models remain paused”, until “we have both validated that the gap is resolved and performed additional red-teaming of the system”; “We will not resume training this particular model”; read 27 September 2026). In the Sources
- Carl Shulman, interviewed by Dwarkesh Patel, “Carl Shulman (Pt 1) - Intelligence Explosion, Primate Evolution, Robot Doublings, & Alignment,” Dwarkesh Podcast, published 14 June 2023 (the page’s transcript, Shulman’s turn at 00:29:37: “You have talk at Google and Microsoft that it’s a billion dollar matter to change market share in search by a percentage point so that can fund a lot. On the far end if you automate human labor we have a hundred trillion dollar economy and most of that economy is paid out in wages, between 50 and 70 trillion dollars per year”; the figure is reported as industry talk, not asserted as the firms’ own; the publication date is the page’s, no recording date stated; house capture under VERIFY 260913/ch01, read 13 September 2026 by v-ch01-shulman; at 00:38 on the page’s transcript: his credences of advanced AI “relatively concentrated, over the next 10 years compared to the rest of the century because we can’t keep going with this rapid redirection of resources into AI. That’s a one-time thing”) In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Alignment.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/alignment (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-alignment-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Alignment}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/alignment},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}