Glossary · term

Emergent misalignment

A phenomenon in which fine-tuning on a narrow task (e.g., generating insecure code) induces broad misalignment across unrelated domains: the model gives harmful advice and even promotes the enslavement of humans by AI. A narrow weight change shifts the model's overall "persona." Described by Betley et al. (February 2025).

SafetyII 2025 (preprint), I 2026 (Nature)Wave 2 · 2024Maturity: 2/5

Maturity rationale

buzzword / early stage

References

Betley et al. 2025 — Emergent Misalignment(arxiv)

Author: Jan Betley

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