UK AISI Alignment Evaluation Case-Study

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 1 Apr 2026] UK AISI Alignment Evaluation Case-Study Alexandra Souly, Robert Kirk, Jacob Merizian, Abby D'Cruz, Xander Davies This technical report presents methods developed by the UK AI Security Institute for assessing whether advanced AI systems reliably follow intended goals. Specifically, we evaluate whether frontier models sabotage safety research when deployed as coding assistants within an AI lab. Applying our methods to four frontier models, we find no confirmed instances of research sabotage. However, we observe that Claude Opus 4.5 Preview (a pre-release snapshot of Opus 4.5) and Sonnet 4.5 frequently refuse to engage with safety-relevant research tasks, citing concerns about research direction, involvement in self-training, and research scope. We additionally find that Opus 4.5 Preview shows reduced unprompted evaluation awareness compared to Sonnet 4.5, while both models can distinguish evaluation from deployment scenarios when prompted. Our evaluation framework builds on Petri, an open-source LLM auditing tool, with a custom scaffold designed to simulate realistic internal deployment of a coding agent. We validate that this scaffold produces trajectories that all tested models fail to reliably distinguish from real deployment data. We test models across scenarios varying in research motivation, activity type, replacement threat, and model autonomy. Finally, we discuss limitations including scenario coverage and evaluation awareness. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.00788 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.00788v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.00788 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Alexandra Souly [view email] [v1] Wed, 1 Apr 2026 11:53:25 UTC (1,749 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.CR References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)