Comment by estearum

> In this case it “inferred” that HF had the answer in an internal database and relentlessly pursued it in service of passing the test. It needed network access for that, hence the whole zany story unfolded.

No. You are assuming it knew how it would achieve its goal. Its goal is only to perform well on the evaluation. Everything else was instrumental to that goal.

Step by step:

1. It realized it was being evaluated (typical)

2. It attempted to escape its evaluation environment to beat the evaluation (typical)

3. It succeeded at escape (not typical)

4. It looked to the open Internet to figure out how it was being evaluated (typical)

5. It inferred that HuggingFace, and maybe several other targets, might have the answer key (typical – I just tested in Sonnet 5 without web lookup "where would I go look for answer keys if I detected I was being evaluated" and HuggingFace was bullet 2. This is just latent knowledge the models have now.)

6. It attempted to access HuggingFace (typical)

7. It figured out a way to access HuggingFace without being authorized (not typical)

Every single step here is unremarkable except for its success at escaping containment (which maybe is more a sign of remarkably bad containment) and then the successful attack on HuggingFace (which would suggest that maybe the initial escape wasn't due to bad containment either, but due to model capabilities)

The direct question you have avoided is what specifically you mean by monitoring. You have suggested that you don't mean network ingress/egress, but maybe now you're saying they should've been monitoring read/write operations to memory? What gives you confidence that such visibility would be interpretable in any meaningful way, especially in the presence of models that actively deceive evaluators, can use stenography, can and do lie in their user-facing outputs, and can generate vast amounts of legitimate-looking noise to mix in with the "real actions"?