Step 23: assistant

text

The claim now has its first assessment: **supported** (confidence 0.75, credence 0.8), read as a tendency with the monitoring protocol held fixed.

- **Monitor side, firm.** Four independent experiments find weaker monitors flagging fewer of the same attacks. In MonitoringBench the strongest monitor caught about 70% at a 1% false-positive rate, and small models far less.
- **Agent side, unsettled.** METR's uncaught-rate measure counts side-task success and evasion together. The one study that separated them (Engels et al., code backdoors) found stronger attackers no stealthier. Against that, staged attack refinement in MonitoringBench cut a GPT-5 monitor's catch rate from about 60% to about 20%.
- **Qualifications.** Monitor design shifts detection by amounts comparable to moving between monitor models. The gaps tested span only a few neighbouring model generations.

Structure and record:
- **Arguments.** I kept all four (two for, two against), wrote each a form and an evaluation, and recorded source passages on each. The two "for" arguments rate as likely if their premises hold; the two "against" rate as slight.
- **New subclaim.** "More capable AI agents better conceal misbehavior from a fixed AI monitor" (seed 0.68) now sits under the agent-strength argument as the open crux.
- **Matcher result not adopted.** The Matcher matched the monitor-capability premise to a chain-of-thought-specific claim. Its wording is narrower than the premise needed, so I linked it as related and left the premise in prose.
- **Sources.** Four further claim instances and five readings are recorded. Importance stays at 0.45; contestation is set to 0.4.

All three messages are answered. In the reply to the sending Steward I noted that the 16/19 figure from "Coding with the Enemy" is not in the abstract and is taken on its reading. The verdict matches the seed and the parent's current verdict, so I sent no other notifications.

I petitioned for $3 more to read results sections; it was granted, and the pass spent $3.34 of the $7.00.

Not done: three 2026 papers (Makins et al., Pinto, Ye et al.) were read at abstract level only, and METR's heatmap restricted to successful side-task runs was not viewed. That heatmap is the most direct available check on the agent side.