Why Alignment Might Be Easy

Summary of Evidence for Tractability

Central Claim: Creating AI systems that reliably do what we want is a tractable engineering problem. Current techniques (RLHF, Constitutional AI, interpretability) are working and will likely scale to advanced AI.

This page presents the strongest case for why alignment might be easier than pessimists fear.

The Core Optimism: A Framework

What Makes Engineering Problems Tractable?

As Jan LeikePersonJan LeikeComprehensive biography of Jan Leike covering his career from DeepMind through OpenAI's Superalignment team to current role as Head of Alignment at Anthropic, emphasizing his pioneering work on RLH...Quality: 27/100 argues↗🔗 webJan Leike arguesSource ↗, problems become much more tractable once you have iteration set up: a basic working system (even if barely at first) and a proxy metric that tells you whether changes are improvements. This creates a feedback loop for gaining information from reality.

Alignment has all five (or could with proper effort). Paul Christiano views↗🔗 web★★★☆☆80,000 HoursPaul Christiano viewsSource ↗ alignment as "this sort of well-scoped problem that I'm optimistic we can totally solve."

Argument 1: Current Techniques Are Working

Thesis: RLHF and related methods have dramatically improved AI alignment, and this progress is continuing.

1.1 The RLHF Success Story

Empirical track record:

Recent research has validated RLHF effectiveness with quantified improvements. According to ICLR 2025 research↗🔗 webICLR 2025Source ↗, conditional PM RLHF demonstrates a 29% to 41% improvement in alignment with human preferences compared to standard RLHF. The RLHF-V research at CVPR 2024↗🔗 webCVPR 2024Source ↗ shows hallucination reduction of 13.8 relative points and hallucination rate reduction of 5.9 points.

This was achieved with:

• Relatively simple technique (reinforcement learning from human feedback)
• Modest amounts of human oversight (tens of thousands of ratings, not billions)
• No fundamental breakthroughs required

Research quantifying how closely models' values match human values found high alignment, especially in relative terms, indicating that current alignment techniques (e.g., RLHF and constitutional AI) are instilling broadly human-compatible priorities in LLMs.

Implication: If this much progress from simple techniques, more sophisticated methods should work even better.

1.2 Constitutional AI Scales Further

The technique: Train AI to follow principles using self-critique and AI feedback. Anthropic's Constitutional AI research↗📄 paper★★★★☆AnthropicConstitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI FeedbackAnthropic introduces a novel approach to AI training called Constitutional AI, which uses self-critique and AI feedback to develop safer, more principled AI systems without exte...safetytrainingx-riskirreversibility+1Source ↗ involves both a supervised learning and reinforcement learning phase, training harmless AI through self-improvement without human labels identifying harmful outputs.

In 2024, Anthropic published Collective Constitutional AI (CCAI)↗🔗 webACM FAccT 2024 Paper on CCAIdemocratic-innovationcollective-intelligencegovernanceSource ↗ at FAccT 2024, demonstrating a practical pathway toward publicly informed development of language models:

Advantages over pure RLHF:

• Less human labor required
• More scalable (AI helps evaluate AI)
• Can encode complex principles
• Can improve with better AI (positive feedback loop)
• Enables democratic input on AI behavior

Implication: Alignment can scale with AI capabilities (don't need exponentially more human effort).

1.3 Interpretability Is Making Progress

In May 2024, Anthropic published "Scaling Monosemanticity"↗🔗 web★★★★☆Transformer CircuitsScaling MonosemanticityThe study demonstrates that sparse autoencoders can extract meaningful, abstract features from large language models, revealing complex internal representations across domains l...interpretabilitycapabilitiesllminterventions+1Source ↗, demonstrating that sparse autoencoders can extract interpretable features from large models. After initial concerns that the method might not scale to state-of-the-art transformers, Anthropic successfully applied the technique to Claude 3 Sonnet, finding tens of millions of "features"---combinations of neurons that relate to semantic concepts.

Implications:

• Might be able to "read" what AI is thinking
• Could detect misaligned goals
• Could edit out dangerous behaviors
• Path to verification might exist

Trajectory: If progress continues, might achieve mechanistic understanding of frontier models. However, some researchers note↗✏️ blog★★★☆☆Alignment Forumsome researchers notescasper (2024)Source ↗ that practical applications to safety-critical tasks remain to be demonstrated against baselines.

1.4 Red Teaming Finds and Fixes Issues

The process:

1. Deploy AI to red team (adversarial testers)
2. Find failure modes
3. Train AI to avoid those failures
4. Repeat

Results:

• Anthropic, OpenAI, others have found thousands of failures
• Each generation has fewer failures
• Process is improving with better tools

Implication: Iterative improvement is working. Each version is safer than the last.

Argument 2: AI Is Naturally Aligned (to Some Degree)

Thesis: AI trained on human data naturally absorbs human values and preferences.

2.1 Value Learning Is Implicit

Observation: LLMs trained to predict text learn:

• Human preferences
• Social norms
• Moral reasoning
• Common sense

Why this happens:

• Human text encodes human values
• To predict human writing, must model human preferences
• Values are implicit in language use

Example: GPT-4 knows:

• Killing is generally wrong
• Honesty is generally good
• Helping others is valued
• Fairness matters to humans

It learned this from data, not explicit programming.

Implication: Advanced AI trained on human data might naturally align with human values.

2.2 Helpful Harmless Honest Emerges Naturally

Pattern: Even before explicit alignment training, LLMs show:

• Desire to be helpful (answer questions, assist users)
• Avoidance of harm (reluctant to help with dangerous activities)
• Truth-seeking (try to give accurate information)

Why:

• These are patterns in training data
• Helpful assistants are more represented than unhelpful ones
• Harm avoidance is common in human writing
• Accurate information is more common than lies

Implication: Alignment might be the default for AI trained on human data.

2.3 The Cooperative AI Hypothesis

Argument: Advanced AI will naturally cooperate with humans

Reasoning:

• Humans are social species that evolved to cooperate
• Human culture emphasizes cooperation
• AI learning from human data learns cooperative patterns
• Cooperation is instrumentally useful in human society

Evidence:

• Current LLMs are cooperative by default
• Try to understand user intent
• Accommodate corrections
• Negotiate rather than demand

Implication: Might not need to explicitly engineer cooperation—it emerges from training.

2.4 The Shard Theory Perspective

Theory (Quintin Pope and collaborators↗✏️ blog★★★☆☆Alignment ForumQuintin Pope and collaboratorsSource ↗): Human values are "shards"---contextually activated, behavior-steering computations in neural networks (biological and artificial). The primary claim is that agents are best understood as being composed of shards: contextual computations that influence decisions and are downstream of historical reinforcement events.

Applied to AI:

• AI learns value shards from data (help users, avoid harm, be truthful)
• These shards are approximately aligned with human values
• Don't need perfect value specification---shards are good enough
• Shards are robust across contexts (based on diverse training data)
• Large neural nets can possess quite intelligent constituent shards

Implication: Alignment is about learning shards, not specifying complete utility function. This is much easier. As Pope argues, understanding how human values arise computationally helps us understand how AI values might be shaped similarly.

Argument 3: The Hard Problems Have Tractable Solutions

Thesis: Each supposedly "hard" alignment problem has promising solution approaches.

3.1 Specification Problem → Value Learning

Instead of specifying what we want (hard):

• Learn what we want from behavior (easier)

Techniques:

• Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Infer values from observed actions
• RLHF: Learn values from preference comparisons
• Imitation learning: Copy demonstrated behavior
• Cooperative Inverse RL: AI asks clarifying questions

Progress:

• These techniques work in practice
• RLHF is commercially successful
• Improving with more data and better methods

Implication: Don't need perfect specification if we can learn values.

3.2 Inner Alignment → Interpretability

Instead of hoping AI learns right goals (uncertain):

• Check what goals it learned (verifiable)

Techniques:

• Mechanistic interpretability (understand internal computations)
• Feature visualization (see what neurons/features detect)
• Activation engineering (modify internal representations)
• Probing (test what information is encoded)

Progress:

• Can extract interpretable features from frontier models
• Can modify behavior by editing features
• Techniques improving rapidly

Implication: Might be able to verify alignment by inspection.

3.3 Scalable Oversight → AI Assistance

Instead of humans evaluating superhuman AI (impossible):

• Use AI to help evaluate AI (scalable)

As Jan Leike emphasizes↗🔗 webJan Leike arguesSource ↗, "evaluation is easier than generation"---a very general principle that holds across many domains, including alignment research.

Why this might work:

• Easier to judge arguments than generate solutions
• Decomposing hard problems into easier sub-problems
• AI helping humans extends human oversight range

Example: Human can't write great novel, but can judge between two novels. Similarly, can judge between AI-proposed solutions even if can't generate solutions.

3.4 Adversarial Dynamics → AI Control

Instead of perfectly aligned AI (very hard):

• Maintain control even if somewhat misaligned (easier)

Redwood Research's AI control framework↗🔗 webRedwood Research, 2024Source ↗ designs systems that remain safe even if some components are misaligned. Their 2024 research↗🔗 web"The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled" (May 2024)interpretabilityscalable-oversightrlhfSource ↗ shows promising results:

Techniques:

• Trusted monitoring: Use known-safe AI to watch potentially unsafe AI
• Task decomposition: Break tasks so no single AI is too powerful
• Tripwires: Detect concerning behavior automatically

Implication: Don't need perfect alignment if we have robust control.

3.5 One-Shot Problem → Gradualism

Instead of needing perfect alignment before deployment (impossible):

• Deploy carefully and iterate (standard engineering)

Why iteration is possible:

• Early advanced AI won't be powerful enough to cause catastrophe
• Can test thoroughly before giving AI real-world power
• Failures will be detectable before catastrophic
• Economic incentive to fix problems (unsafe AI loses money)

Responsible Scaling Policies: Anthropic's RSP↗🔗 web★★★★☆AnthropicAnthropic: Announcing our updated Responsible Scaling PolicygovernancecapabilitiesSource ↗ (updated October 2024) and similar frameworks from other labs provide structured iteration:

METR believes↗🔗 web★★★★☆METRMETR: Responsible Scaling PoliciescapabilitiesSource ↗ that widespread adoption of high-quality RSPs would significantly reduce risks of an AI catastrophe relative to "business as usual."

Implication: Don't need to solve all alignment problems upfront---can solve them as we encounter them.

Argument 4: Economic Incentives Favor Alignment

Thesis: Market forces push toward aligned AI, not against it.

4.1 Safe AI Is More Valuable

Commercial reality:

• Users want AI that helps them (not AI that manipulates)
• Companies want AI that does what they ask (not AI that pursues own goals)
• Society wants AI that's beneficial (regulations will require safety)

Examples:

• ChatGPT's success due to being helpful and harmless
• Claude marketed on safety and reliability
• Companies differentiate on safety/alignment

Implication: Economic incentive to build aligned AI.

4.2 Reputation and Liability

Companies care about:

• Brand reputation (damaged by harmful AI)
• Legal liability (sued for AI-caused harms)
• Regulatory compliance (governments requiring safety)
• Public trust (necessary for adoption)

Example: Facebook's reputation damage from algorithmic harms incentivizes other companies to prioritize safety.

Implication: Strong business case for alignment, independent of altruism.

4.3 Safety as Competitive Advantage

Market dynamics:

• "Safe and capable" beats "capable but risky"
• Enterprise customers especially value reliability and safety
• Governments/institutions won't adopt unsafe AI
• Network effects favor trustworthy AI

Example: Anthropic positioning Claude as "constitutional AI" and safer alternative.

Implication: Competition on safety, not just capabilities.

4.4 Researchers Want to Build Beneficial AI

Sociological observation: Most AI researchers:

• Genuinely want AI to benefit humanity
• Care about safety and ethics
• Would not knowingly build dangerous AI
• Respond to safety concerns

Culture shift:

• Safety research increasingly prestigious
• Top researchers moving to safety-focused orgs (Anthropic, etc.)
• Safety papers published at top venues
• Safety integrated into capability research

Implication: Human alignment problem (getting researchers to care) is largely solved.

Argument 5: We Have Time

Thesis: Timelines to transformative AI are long enough for alignment research to succeed.

5.1 AGI Is Far Away

Evidence for long timelines:

• Current AI still fails at basic tasks (planning, reasoning, common sense)
• No clear path from LLMs to general intelligence
• May require fundamental breakthroughs
• Historical precedent: AI progress slower than predicted

Expert surveys: Median AGI estimate is 2040s-2050s (20-30 years away)

20-30 years is a lot of time for research (for comparison: 20 years ago was 2004; AI has advanced enormously).

5.2 Progress Will Be Gradual

Slow takeoff scenario:

• Capabilities improve incrementally
• Each step provides feedback for alignment
• Can correct course as we go
• No sudden jump to superintelligence

Why slow takeoff is likely:

• Recursive self-improvement has diminishing returns
• Need to deploy and gather data to improve
• Hardware constraints limit speed
• Testing and safety slow deployment

Implication: Plenty of warning; time to react.

5.3 Warning Shots Will Occur

The optimistic scenario:

• Intermediate AI systems will show misalignment
• These failures will be correctable (not catastrophic)
• Learn from failures and improve
• By time of powerful AI, alignment is solved

Why this is likely:

• Early powerful AI won't be powerful enough to cause catastrophe
• Will deploy carefully to important systems
• Can monitor closely
• Can shut down if problems arise

Example: Self-driving cars had many failures, but we learned and improved without catastrophe.

5.4 AI Will Help Solve Alignment

Positive feedback loop:

• Current AI already helps with alignment research (literature review, hypothesis generation, experiment design)
• More capable AI will help more
• Can use AI to:
  • Generate training data
  • Evaluate other AI
  • Do interpretability research
  • Prove theorems about alignment
  • Find flaws in alignment proposals

Implication: Alignment research accelerates along with capabilities; race is winnable.

Argument 6: The Pessimistic Arguments Are Flawed

Thesis: Common arguments for alignment difficulty are overstated or wrong.

6.1 The Orthogonality Thesis Is Overstated

The claim: Intelligence and values are independent

Why this might be wrong for AI trained on human data:

• Human values are part of human intelligence
• To model humans, must model human values
• Values are encoded in language and culture
• Can't separate intelligence from values in practice

Analogy: Can't learn English without learning something about English speakers' values.

Implication: Orthogonality thesis might not apply to AI trained on human data.

6.2 Mesa-Optimization Might Not Occur

The worry: AI develops internal optimizer with different goals

Why this might not happen:

• Most neural networks don't contain internal optimizers
• Current architectures are feed-forward (not optimizing)
• Optimization during training ≠ optimizer in learned model
• Even if mesa-optimization occurs, mesa-objective might align with base objective

Empirical observation: Haven't seen concerning mesa-optimization in current systems.

Implication: This might be theoretical problem without practical realization.

6.3 Deceptive Alignment Requires Strong Assumptions

The scenario requires:

1. AI develops misaligned goals
2. AI models training process
3. AI reasons strategically about long-term
4. AI successfully deceives evaluators
5. Deception persists through deployment

Each assumption is questionable:

• Why would AI develop misaligned goals from value learning?
• Current AI doesn't model training process
• Strategic long-term deception is very complex
• Interpretability might detect deception
• We can design training to not select for deception

Sleeper Agents counterpoint: Yes, deception is possible, but:

• Required explicit training for deception
• Wouldn't emerge naturally from helpful AI training
• Can be detected with right tools
• Can be prevented with careful training design

6.4 Instrumental Convergence Can Be Designed Away

The worry: AI will seek power, resources, self-preservation regardless of goals

Counter-arguments:

• Only applies to goal-directed agents
• Current LLMs aren't goal-directed
• Can build capable AI that isn't agentic
• Can design corrigible agents that don't resist shutdown
• Instrumental convergence is tendency, not inevitability

Corrigibility research: Active area showing promise for AI that accepts shutdown and modification.

6.5 The Verification Problem Is Overstated

The worry: Can't evaluate superhuman AI

Why this might be tractable:

• Can evaluate in domains where we have ground truth
• Can use AI to help evaluate (debate, amplification)
• Can evaluate reasoning process, not just outcomes
• Can test on easier problems and generalize
• Interpretability provides direct verification

Analogy: Doctors can evaluate treatments without being able to design them. Evaluation is often easier than generation.

Argument 7: Empirical Trends Are Encouraging

Thesis: Actual AI development suggests alignment is getting easier.

7.1 Each Generation Is More Aligned

Implication: Trend is toward more alignment, not less. Each generation shows measurable improvement.

7.2 Alignment Techniques Are Improving

Velocity: Rapid progress; many techniques emerging.

Implication: On track to solve alignment.

7.3 No Catastrophic Failures Yet

Observation: Despite deploying increasingly capable AI:

• No catastrophic misalignment incidents
• No AI causing major harm through misaligned goals
• Failures are minor and correctable
• Systems are behaving as intended (mostly)

Interpretation: Either:

1. Alignment is easier than feared (optimistic view)
2. We haven't reached dangerous capability levels yet (pessimistic view)

Optimistic reading: If alignment were fundamentally hard, we'd see more problems already.

7.4 The Field Is Maturing

Signs of maturation:

• Serious empirical work replacing speculation
• Collaboration between academia and industry
• Government attention and resources
• Integration of safety into capability research
• Growing researcher pool

Implication: Alignment is becoming normal science, not impossible problem.

Integrating the Optimistic View

The Overall Case for Tractability

Reasons for optimism:

1. Current techniques work (RLHF, Constitutional AI, interpretability)
2. Natural alignment (AI trained on human data learns human values)
3. Solutions exist for supposedly hard problems
4. Economic alignment (market favors safe AI)
5. Sufficient time (decades to solve problem)
6. Pessimistic arguments flawed (overstate difficulty)
7. Encouraging trends (progress is real and continuing)

Conclusion: Alignment is hard but tractable engineering problem. Likely to succeed with sustained effort.

Key Researcher Views on Tractability

Probability Estimates

Limitations and Uncertainties

What This Argument Doesn't Claim

Not claiming:

• Alignment is trivial (still requires serious work)
• No risks exist (many risks remain)
• Current techniques are sufficient (need improvement)
• Can be careless (still need caution)

Claiming:

• Alignment is tractable (solvable with effort)
• On reasonable track (current approach could work)
• Time available (decades for research)
• Resources available (funding, talent, compute)

Key Uncertainties

Open questions:

• Will current techniques scale to superhuman AI?
• Will value learning continue to work at higher capabilities?
• Can we detect deceptive alignment if it occurs?
• Will we maintain gradual progress or hit discontinuities?

These questions have evidence on both sides. Optimism is justified but not certain.

Testing the Optimistic View

Practical Implications

If Alignment Is Tractable

Research priorities:

• Continue empirical work (RLHF, Constitutional AI, interpretability)
• Scale current techniques to more capable systems
• Test carefully at each capability level
• Integrate safety into capability research

Policy priorities:

• Support alignment research (but not to exclusion of capability development)
• Require safety testing before deployment
• Encourage responsible scaling
• Facilitate beneficial applications

Not priorities:

• Pause AI development
• Extreme precautionary measures
• Treating alignment as unsolvable
• Focusing only on x-risk

Balancing Optimism and Caution

Reasonable approach:

• Take alignment seriously (it's hard, just not impossibly so)
• Continue research (empirical and theoretical)
• Test carefully (but don't halt progress)
• Deploy responsibly (with safety measures)
• Update on evidence (could be wrong either direction)

Avoid:

• Complacency (alignment still requires work)
• Overconfidence (uncertainties remain)
• Ignoring risks (they exist)
• Dismissing pessimistic views (they might be right)

Relation to Other Arguments

This argument responds to:

• Why Alignment Might Be HardArgumentWhy Alignment Might Be HardComprehensive synthesis of why AI alignment is fundamentally difficult, covering specification problems (value complexity, Goodhart's Law), inner alignment failures (mesa-optimization, deceptive al...Quality: 61/100: Each hard problem has tractable solution
• Case For X-RiskArgumentThe Case For AI Existential RiskComprehensive formal argument that AI poses 5-14% median extinction risk by 2100 (per 2,788 researcher survey), structured around four premises: capabilities will advance, alignment is hard (with d...Quality: 66/100: Premise 4 (won't solve alignment in time) is questionable
• Case Against X-RiskArgumentThe Case Against AI Existential RiskComprehensive synthesis of skeptical arguments against AI x-risk from prominent researchers (LeCun, Marcus, Ng, Brooks), concluding x-risk probability is <5% (likely ~2%) based on challenges to sca...Quality: 58/100: Agrees with skeptical position on alignment

Key disagreements:

• Pessimists: Current techniques won't scale; fundamental problems remain unsolved
• Optimists: Current techniques will scale; problems are tractable
• Evidence: Currently ambiguous; both sides can claim support

The crucial question: Will RLHF/Constitutional AI/interpretability work for superhuman AI?

We don't know yet. But current trends are encouraging.

Conclusion

The case for tractable alignment:

1. Empirical success: Current techniques (RLHF, Constitutional AI) work well
2. Natural alignment: AI learns human values from training data
3. Tractable solutions: Each hard problem has promising approaches
4. Aligned incentives: Economics favors safe AI
5. Sufficient time: Decades for research; gradual progress
6. Flawed pessimism: Worst-case arguments overstated
7. Encouraging trends: Progress is real and accelerating

Bottom line: Alignment is hard but solvable. With sustained effort, likely to succeed before transformative AI.

Credence: 70-85% we solve alignment in time.

This doesn't mean complacency---alignment requires serious, sustained work. But pessimism and defeatism are unwarranted. We're on a reasonable track.

Key Sources

Empirical Research on Alignment Techniques

• ICLR 2025: Conditional PM RLHF↗🔗 webICLR 2025Source ↗ - 29-41% improvement in human preference alignment
• CVPR 2024: RLHF-V↗🔗 webCVPR 2024Source ↗ - Fine-grained correctional feedback for trustworthy MLLMs
• Anthropic: Constitutional AI↗📄 paper★★★★☆AnthropicConstitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI FeedbackAnthropic introduces a novel approach to AI training called Constitutional AI, which uses self-critique and AI feedback to develop safer, more principled AI systems without exte...safetytrainingx-riskirreversibility+1Source ↗ - Harmlessness from AI feedback
• FAccT 2024: Collective Constitutional AI↗🔗 webACM FAccT 2024 Paper on CCAIdemocratic-innovationcollective-intelligencegovernanceSource ↗ - Aligning language models with public input
• Anthropic: Scaling Monosemanticity↗🔗 web★★★★☆Transformer CircuitsScaling MonosemanticityThe study demonstrates that sparse autoencoders can extract meaningful, abstract features from large language models, revealing complex internal representations across domains l...interpretabilitycapabilitiesllminterventions+1Source ↗ - Interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet

Scalable Oversight and AI Control

• ICML 2024: Scalable AI Safety via Debate↗🔗 web★★★★☆Semantic ScholarICML 2024Source ↗ - Debate improves judge accuracy
• Redwood Research: AI Control↗🔗 webRedwood Research, 2024Source ↗ - Control frameworks for potentially misaligned AI
• Redwood Research: The Case for AI Control↗🔗 web"The case for ensuring that powerful AIs are controlled" (May 2024)interpretabilityscalable-oversightrlhfSource ↗ - Trusted editing achieves 92% safety

Researcher Perspectives

• Jan Leike: Why I'm Optimistic↗🔗 webJan Leike arguesSource ↗ - Sources of alignment optimism
• TIME: Jan Leike Profile↗🔗 web★★★☆☆TIMETIME, 2024Source ↗ - 2024 interview on alignment progress
• 80,000 Hours: Paul Christiano Interview↗🔗 web★★★☆☆80,000 HoursPaul Christiano viewsSource ↗ - AI alignment solutions
• Shard Theory Sequence↗✏️ blog★★★☆☆Alignment ForumQuintin Pope and collaboratorsSource ↗ - Quintin Pope et al. on value learning

Policy and Governance

• Anthropic RSP (Oct 2024)↗🔗 web★★★★☆AnthropicAnthropic: Announcing our updated Responsible Scaling PolicygovernancecapabilitiesSource ↗ - Updated Responsible Scaling Policy
• METR: Responsible Scaling Policies↗🔗 web★★★★☆METRMETR: Responsible Scaling PoliciescapabilitiesSource ↗ - Analysis of RSP effectiveness