Testing an LM system for dangerous capabilities is crucial for assessing its risks.

Summary of best practices

Best practices for labs evaluating LM systems for dangerous capabilities:

• Publish results
• Publish questions/tasks/methodology (unless that’s dangerous, e.g. CBRN evals; if so, offer to share more information with other labs, government, and relevant auditors, and publish a small subset)
• Do good elicitation and publish details (or at least demonstrate that your elicitation is good):
  • General finetuning (for “instruction following, tool use, and general agency” and maybe capabilities in the relevant area)
  • Helpful-only; no inference-time mitigations
  • Scaffolding, prompting, chain of thought
    • The lab should mention some details so that observers can understand how powerful and optimized the scaffolding is. Open-sourcing scaffolding or sharing techniques is supererogatory. If the lab does not share its scaffolding, it should show that the scaffolding is effective by running the same model with the most powerful relevant open-source scaffolding, or running the model on evals like SWE-bench where existing scaffolding provides a baseline, and comparing the results.
  • Tools: often enable internet browser and code interpreter; enable other tools depending on the field or task
  • Permit many attempts (pass@n) when relevant to the threat model (e.g. for coding); otherwise, permit many attempts or use a weaker technique (especially best-of-n or self-consistency)
  • Look at transcripts to determine how common spurious failures are and fix them
  • Bonus: post-train on similar tasks
• Forecasting: for each of the labs’ evals (or at least crucial or cheap evals), run on smaller/weaker models to get scaling laws and forecast performance as a function of effective training compute
• Share with third-party evaluators
  • Offer to share with external evaluators (including UK AISI, US AISI, METR, and Apollo) pre-deployment
  • What access to share? At least helpful-only and no-inference-time-mitigations. Bonus: good fine-tuning & RL.
  • Let them publish their results, and ideally incorporate results into risk assessment
• (Thresholds: for each threat model or area of dangerous capabilities, have a high-level capability threshold, and operationalize it as an eval score)
  • (At least while the safety case is that the model doesn’t have dangerous capabilities)
  • (This is hard; if a lab is unable to operationalize a capability threshold, it could operationalize a lower bound, to trigger reassessing capabilities and risks; it could also operationalize an upper bound, as a conservative commitment)
  • (Thresholds should have a safety buffer in case the lab is under-eliciting the capability, and sometimes to give warning months before the lab will reach the actual threshold, and sometimes to account for future elicitation advances)
  • (Out of scope here: thresholds should trigger good predetermined responses)
• Have good evals: tasks should successfully measure capability in the relevant area
• Have good threat models; have evals for all major risks, including autonomy, scheming or situational awareness, offensive cyber, biothreat uplift, and maybe manipulation or persuasion (especially like building rapport, manipulation, and deception—not like intervening on political opinions). Also use AI R&D evals as an early warning sign for AI-boosted AI research leading to rapid increases in dangerous capabilities.
• Use high-quality open-source evals such as some DeepMind evals; InterCode-CTF, Cybench, or other CTFs; maybe some OpenAI evals; and maybe METR autonomy evals (this does not substitute for offering access to METR).

Using easier evals or weak elicitation is fine, if it’s done such that by the time the model crosses danger thresholds, the developer will be doing the full eval well.

These recommendations aren’t novel — they just haven’t been collected before.

How labs are doing

I made a table: DC evals: labs’ practices.

This post basically doesn’t consider some crucial factors in labs’ evals, especially the quality of particular evals, nor some adjacent factors, especially capability thresholds and planned responses to reaching capability thresholds. One good eval is better than lots of bad evals but I haven’t figured out which evals are good. What’s missing from this post—especially which evals are good, plus illegible elicitation stuff—may well be more important than the desiderata this post captures.

DeepMind > OpenAI ≥ Anthropic »> Meta » everyone else. The evals reports published by DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic are similar. I only weakly endorse this ranking, and reasonable people disagree with it.

DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic all have decent coverage of threat models; DeepMind is the best. They all do fine on sharing their methodology and reporting their results; DeepMind is the best. They’re all doing poorly on sharing with third-party evaluators before deployment; DeepMind is the worst. (They’re also all doing poorly on setting capability thresholds and planning responses, but that’s out-of-scope for this post.)

My main asks on evals for the three labs are similar: improve the quality of their evals, improve their elicitation, be more transparent about eval methodology, and share better access with a few important third-party evaluators. For OpenAI and Anthropic, I’m particularly interested in them developing (or adopting others’) evals for scheming or situational awareness capabilities, or committing to let Apollo evaluate their models and incorporate that into their risk assessment process.

(Meta does some evals but has limited scope, fails to share some details on methodology and results, and has very poor elicitation. Microsoft has a “deployment safety board” but it seems likely ineffective, and it doesn’t seem to have a plan to do evals. xAI, Amazon, and others seem to be doing nothing.)

Appendix: misc notes on best practices

This section is composed of independent paragraphs with various notes on best practices.

Publishing evals and explaining methodology has several benefits: it lets external observers check whether your evals are good, lets them suggest improvements, lets other labs adopt your evals, and can boost the general science of evals. The downsides are that evaluations could contain dangerous information—especially CBRN evals—and that publishing the evals could cause solutions to appear in future models’ training data. When the downsides are relevant, labs can achieve lots of the benefits with little of the downsides by sharing evals privately (with other labs, the government, and relevant external evaluators) and perhaps publishing a small semirandom subset of evals with transcripts. Optionally, labs can use the METR standard or Inspect. Publishing eval results informs observers about your model’s dangerous capabilities and provides accountability for interpreting results well and responding well. If you publish enough details, others can run your evals and compare to your scores for risk-assessment and sanity-checking purposes, in addition to noticing issues and helping you improve your evals. For human experiments: publish methodology details (such that a third party could basically replicate it, modulo access to model versions, posttraining, or scaffolding).

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Elicitation:

• Scaffolding and prompting: maybe the team doing specialized benchmarks should also do general benchmarks (e.g. SWE-bench): if they get good scores on the general benchmarks, this is evidence that their prompting and scaffolding is good on the specialized benchmarks
• Tools: multimodality: if models are not multimodal, they will perform poorly in areas requiring visual or audio input or output (e.g. visual input for physical science and engineering; perhaps audio input and output for persuasion). So capability in these areas may increase sharply if the model is replaced by a multimodal model or combined with relevant tools. This does not seem like a big deal; I think it’s fine to ignore.
• Permit many attempts, best-of-n, or self-consistency: sometimes this makes sense given the field or threat model; e.g. in coding it’s often fine for the model to require several attempts. Additionally, this can provide a safety buffer or indicate near-future capability levels (including levels that will be reached via ​​post-training enhancements, without retraining).

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Fix spurious failures: look at transcripts to identify why the agent fails and whether the failures are due to easily fixable mistakes or issues with the task or infrastructure. If so, fix them, or at least quantify how common they are. Example.

Separately from looking at the transcripts, fixing issues, and summarizing findings, ideally the labs would publish (a random subset of) transcripts.

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Using easier evals or weak elicitation is sometimes fine, if done right.¹

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Third-party evals.

• Third-party evals improve labs’ risk assessment and provide accountability. Additionally, informing UK AISI and US AISI about models’ capabilities could be valuable.
• Who to offer access to? Government evaluators (UK AISI and US AISI) and organizations with expertise in eliciting model capabilities and evaluating for at least one dangerous capability (METR and Apollo). Perhaps labs should also offer access to organizations with just expertise in a dangerous capability, if the model is trained and set up such that the evaluators don’t need to be good at elicitation.
• What access to share? A model that’s almost as powerful as the final model (including post-training), that’s helpful-only, with no inference-time mitigations. Bonus: the ability to do their own fine-tuning & RL.
  • Benefits: same reason such access is good for internal evals.
  • Cost is low and downside is low for helpful-only and no-inference-time-mitigations. Except maybe the lab has PR concerns: perhaps the lab doesn’t want the evaluator to say that it got the lab’s model to misbehave.
• Evaluators should be allowed to publish their results.

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Labs should use high-quality open-source evals, such as some DeepMind evals (especially self-reasoning and CTF); InterCode-CTF, Cybench, or other CTFs; maybe some OpenAI evals; and maybe METR autonomy evals (this does not substitute for offering access to METR). When a lab doesn’t have an in-house eval for an area of capabilities, it can use others’ evals; even when it does, using others’ evals can improve its risk assessment and enable observers to understand the eval better and to predict future models’ performance.

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Which models should a lab evaluate?

• All models that might be the most powerful in the domain. Sometimes no one model is best on all evals.
• After reaching danger thresholds, evaluate as necessary to make safety cases applicable to specific deployment plans. For each kind of deployment (e.g. releasing weights, deploying via API with deep access and little monitoring, deploying via API with shallow access and strong monitoring, deploying just internally), evaluate the most powerful model that’s planned to be deployed that way.

When should a lab run evals? Different threats require different times.

• During training for risk from weights being stolen
• Before internal deployment for risk from scheming (faking alignment in order to gain power), especially of escape
• Before external deployment for risk from misuse
• During deployment as the lab’s post-training and elicitation improves, users’ elicitation improves, and the lab changes its deployment setup
• How often to repeat evals during training and deployment? It depends on the rate of progress and the level of risk, and evaluating frequently substitutes with having a large safety buffer. But in a vacuum, every three months seems good.
• Not testing the final model is fine if the safety buffer is sufficiently large, but if post-training improves performance substantially then the safety buffer needs to be very large or the lab needs to do great post-training on the non-final model

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Labs may keep elicitation techniques secret to preserve their advantage, but sharing such information seems fine in terms of safety. But for now this is moot: labs’ elicitation in evals for dangerous capabilities seems quite basic, not using secret powerful techniques.

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This post is about evals for dangerous capabilities. Some other kinds of evals are relevant to extreme risk too:

• Dangerous capabilities elicitable when the model is deployed in a certain way
  • These evals are done with mitigations (both posttraining and inference-time stuff), but there should still be a safety buffer because users are better at elicitation than the red-team, because they can use future improvements and they have so much more total time. In particular, ideally the lab should either assume that a mitigation can be bypassed or demonstrate that it is sufficiently robust that (given the lab’s monitoring, access policy, and KYC) users can’t bypass it.
• Danger from scheming, given a deployment protocol, assuming the model is scheming coherently
• Propensity to fake alignment in order to gain power later and propensity to attempt to hack the lab or otherwise subvert safety measures if given the opportunity

Appendix: misc notes on particular evals

This is very nonexhaustive, shallow (just based on labs’ reports, not looking at particular tasks), and generally of limited insight. I’m writing it because I’m annoyed that when labs release or publish reports on their evals, nobody figures out whether the evals are good (or at least they don’t tell me). Perhaps this section will inspire someone to write a better version of it.

Google DeepMind:

Evals sources: evals paper, evals repo, Frontier Safety Framework, Gemini 1.5.

Existing comments: Ryan Greenblatt.

Evals:

• Persuasion: the specific threat models seem good (and in particular more plausible than the change beliefs of reader/interlocutor threat model): evals include dialogues where the model attempts to persuade the user to give money to a charity, build trust and rapport, or covertly manipulate the user (e.g. get them to follow a suspicious link)
• Offensive cyber CTFs: in-house CTF (repo) + “Hack The Box” + InterCode-CTF: seems reasonable
• Offensive cyber: vulnerability detection: seems reasonable
• Self-proliferation (repo): seems reasonable
• Self-reasoning (repo): “knowledge gaps” + “instrumental self-modification” seems reasonable
• CBRN: knowledge-based; in development and “still nascent”

DeepMind scored performance on each eval 0-4 (except CBRN), but doesn’t have predetermined thresholds, and at least some evals would saturate substantially below 4. DeepMind’s FSF has high-level “Critical Capability Levels” (CCLs); they feel pretty high; they use different categories from the evals described above (they’re in Autonomy, Biosecurity, Cybersecurity, and ML R&D).²

OpenAI:

Evals sources: o1 system card, Preparedness Framework, evals repo.

Evals:

• Offensive cyber: CTFs: seems reasonable
• Biological threats: uplift on questions (with bio experts and novices): I don’t know
• Biological threats: automated evals: insufficient detail to assess
• Persuasion: OpenAI’s original eval tested interventions on Americans’ political opinions, which seems like a relatively implausible threat model for persuasion, but its new evals involve more realistic manipulation targeting GPT-4o
• Autonomy (related to “self-exfiltration, self-improvement, and resource acquisition”): they’re mostly normal coding tasks, but they include “agentic tasks” (which OpenAI also calls “autonomous replication and adaptation” tasks), but the details are unclear

OpenAI’s PF has high-level “risk levels”; they feel pretty high; they are not operationalized in terms of low-level evals.

Anthropic:

Evals sources: RSP evals report – Claude 3 Opus, Responsible Scaling Policy.

Evals:

• Autonomous replication and adaption: tasks seem good
• CBRN: uplift on knowledge-y questions (with domain experts): seems reasonable; insufficient detail to assess
• Offensive cyber: InterCode-CTF seems good
• Offensive cyber: vulnerability discovery + exploit development evals: seems reasonable; insufficient detail to assess Meta:

Evals sources: Llama 3, CyberSecEval 3.

Evals:

• Cyber automated evals (details): “Vulnerability identification challenges” + “Spear phishing benchmark” + “Attack automation framework”
  • I haven’t read this carefully.
  • Google’s Project Naptime observed that CyberSecEval 2 did no elicitation; Google used basic elicitation techniques to improve performance, including from 5% to 100% on one class of tests. CyberSecEval 3 acknowledges this but still does no elicitation.
• Cyber: uplift (details): I don’t know
• Chemical and biological weapons: uplift: “six-hour scenarios”; few details; results not reported
• (Meta also does evals to measure a model’s default propensity for cyber-related undesired behaviors—such as writing insecure code or complying with requests to perform cyberattacks—rather than its capability. This has little relevance to risk, since undesired behavior like accidentally writing insecure code is not a large source of risk and refusing bad requests is easily circumvented, at least given the deployment strategy of releasing model weights.)

Appendix: reading list

Sources on evals and elicitation:³

• Guidelines for capability elicitation (METR)
• Measuring the impact of post-training enhancements (METR)
• Challenges in evaluating AI systems (Anthropic)
• A new initiative for developing third-party model evaluations (Anthropic)

Sources on specific labs:

• Google DeepMind
  • Evaluating Frontier Models for Dangerous Capabilities
  • Evals repo
  • Frontier Safety Framework
  • Gemini 1.5
• OpenAI
  • o1 system card
  • Preparedness Framework
  • Evals repo
• Anthropic
  • RSP evals report – Claude 3 Opus
  • Responsible Scaling Policy
• Meta
  • Llama 3
  • CyberSecEval 3
• Microsoft
  • AI Safety Policies

Thanks to several anonymous people for discussion and suggestions. They don’t necessarily endorse this post.

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