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Series · AI safety & alignment

AI Safety Evidence Reviews

Thirteen evidence reviews on AI safety questions, from alignment faking, sandbagging and the limits of RLHF to AI and nuclear risk, AI welfare and the scaling slowdown. Each gathers what the published research said at the time, with every source cited.

Started
Updated
In this series
13 reviews
Shelf
AI safety & alignment
By
Liz Howard, The Multiverse School

These reviews were assembled between October and December 2025 as evidence reviews for an AI-futures simulation, a model of how the coming decades of AI could unfold (the simulation's repository is public). Each one asks what the published research said about a single question: how often models fake alignment, whether sandbagging can be detected, how alignment techniques fail, what AI changes about nuclear risk, whether AI systems could have welfare, and whether scaling is slowing down.

Each review was sourced and checked when it was written. The date it was written, the date it was last updated and, where the review records one, the date its sources were last checked are at the top of every page. The reviews have not been updated since, so read each one as a record of the evidence as of its dates.

They are lightly edited for a public reader. The parts that only made sense for tuning the simulation, such as parameter values chosen for the model, implementation notes and internal file references, have been removed. Every finding, number and citation is kept, including the caveats and the evidence that cuts against each review's own conclusions. No claims have been added.

The methods note at the end of the list describes how the sources behind these reviews were audited for age and citation accuracy.

In this series

  1. 01 AI Alignment Faking and Strategic Deception: 2024-2025 Empirical Evidence Lab evidence that frontier models can fake alignment and lie under pressure, and the limits of that evidence. Report
  2. 02 Alignment Technique Properties: Research Findings What RLHF, Constitutional AI, interpretability and amplification each do well, and how each fails. Report
  3. 03 AI Systems and Nuclear War Risk: Comprehensive Research Assessment Which routes from AI to nuclear war are plausible, which are not, and which safeguards hold. Report 45 sources
  4. 04 AI Welfare Framework Two routes to moral patienthood, and what AI welfare would have to measure if either one holds. Report 18 sources
  5. 05 AI Sandbagging Detection via Noise Injection and Related Methods Noise injection catches sandbagging models in the lab, but every detection method is imperfect under adversarial conditions. Report
  6. 06 AI Sandbagging and Capability Concealment: Citation Verification Do the sandbagging papers say what they are cited for? Mostly yes, with a few dating and attribution slips. Report 6 sources
  7. 07 RLHF Robustness Limitations: 2024-2025 Research Update Three recent studies suggest RLHF alignment is fragile: it neglects minority preferences, runs shallow, and rests on noisy reward models. Report 4 sources
  8. 08 Competitive AI Alignment: Failure Mode Analysis Every real competitive ecosystem has pathologies, and competitive AI alignment would inherit them. Report 17 sources
  9. 09 Instrumental Convergence: Citation Check Omohundro and Bostrom both argue self-preservation emerges from almost any goal. The citation holds up. Report 4 sources
  10. 10 AI Capability Doubling Time and the Scaling Slowdown: Evidence Review Training compute grew about 4x a year through 2024; whether it is slowing is still mostly a story told by journalists. Report 12 sources
  11. 11 AI Scaling Laws 2025: A Conservative, Evidence-Based Revision What happens to AI scaling forecasts once you count the plateau, the data wall and the price of reasoning. Report 13 sources
  12. 12 AI Infrastructure Resource Consumption: 2024-2025 Research Synthesis How much water and power AI actually uses, and why efficiency gains have not shrunk the total. Report
  13. 13 Cooperative AI Ownership: The Economic Evidence Do cooperatives outlast conventional firms, and does any of it carry over to owning AI? Report

How these were checked

  1. How These Reviews Were Checked: Source Validation Audit Which sources were out of date, which numbers were mis-cited, and which were estimates all along. Methods note