From personas to intentions: towards a science of motivations for AI models — LessWrong

TLDR: • * Behavior-only descriptions are useful, but insufficient for aligning advanced models with high assurance. * Two models can look equally a…

x From personas to intentions: towards a science of motivations for AI models — LessWrong AI Frontpage 77 From personas to intentions: towards a science of motivations for AI models by David Africa , Jacob Pfau 14th Apr 2026 8 min read 5 77 TLDR: Behavior-only descriptions are useful, but insufficient for aligning advanced models with high assurance. Two models can look equally aligned on ordinary prompts while being driven by very different underlying motivations; this difference may only show up in rare but crucial situations. So persona research should aim to infer motivational structure: t

saved by

• Kaustubh Kislay
• Arya Pasumarthi

related reading

• The behavioral selection model for predicting AI motivations — LessWronglesswrong.com
• The Case for Model Forensics — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Should We Train Against (CoT) Monitors? — LessWronglesswrong.com
• The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humansalignment.anthropic.com
• The behavioral selection model for predicting AI motivationsblog.redwoodresearch.org
• Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem — LessWronglesswrong.com
• [2606.26071] Model Forensics: Investigating Whether Concerning Behavior Reflects Misalignmentarxiv.org
• Thousand-dimensional structure — Resolutionresolution.org
• Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations — LessWronglesswrong.com
• GitHub - suzana-ilic/study_model_behavior: Model Behavior Study Groupgithub.com
• Clarifying the role of the behavioral selection model — LessWronglesswrong.com
• New report: “Scheming AIs: Will AIs fake alignment during training in order to get power?”joecarlsmith.com