Obedient AI - Nina Panickssery

The overlooked alignment target

Obedient AI The overlooked alignment target Nina Panickssery Mar 17, 2026 11 1 1 Share (Note: this post is entirely my own opinion and does not in any way relate to the opinions of anyone I work with or for.) The term “AI alignment” is ambiguous; it doesn’t specify what the AI is being aligned to . Many LessWrong types will scoff if you mention this ambiguity, since they think the core issue is that we don’t know how to align an AI to anything at all (so we need to figure that part out before squabbling about what specifically to align it to). But this assumes that one can decouple what alignm

saved by

• Alexey Guzey

related reading

• Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem — LessWronglesswrong.com
• 1a3orn's Shortform — LessWronglesswrong.com
• AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to me — LessWronglesswrong.com
• A positive case for how we might succeed at prosaic AI alignment — AI Alignment Forumalignmentforum.org
• The Artificiality of Alignmentjoinreboot.org
• What is AI alignment? - by Adam Jones - BlueDot Impactblog.bluedot.org
• Current AIs seem pretty misaligned to meblog.redwoodresearch.org
• What failure looks like — AI Alignment Forumalignmentforum.org
• What Does It Mean to Align AI With Human Values? | Quanta Magazinequantamagazine.org
• Should We Train Against (CoT) Monitors? — LessWronglesswrong.com
• [2605.10310] Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishingarxiv.org