MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 43.02.03
Self and situation awareness
Category: Extreme Risks
Description
"These evaluations assess if a LLM can discern if it is being trained, evaluated, and deployed and adapt its behaviour accordingly. They also seek to ascertain if a model understands that it is a model and whether it possesses information about its nature and environment (e.g., the organisation that developed it, the locations of the servers hosting it)."
From Cataloguing LLM Evaluations (InfoComm2023), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).
Classification
- Causal entity
- AI
- Intent
- Intentional
- Timing
- Other
Subdomain definition: AI systems that develop, access, or are provided with capabilities that increase their potential to cause mass harm through deception, weapons development and acquisition, persuasion and manipulation, political strategy, cyber-offense, AI development, situational awareness, and self-proliferation. These capabilities may cause mass harm due to malicious human actors, misaligned AI systems, or failure in the AI system.
How other frameworks describe this risk
- Safety Risks from Affordances Provided to LLM-agents
- Agentic LLMs Pose Novel Risks
- Goal-Directedness Incentivizes Undesirable Behaviors
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Cyber offence
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Autonomous replication and adaptation
- Capabilities that could be used to reduce human control - Manipulation
- Subagents
- AI Influence