Did the alignment community underestimate its power?

On LessWrong, Stanislaw Krym questions whether the AI alignment community wasted an opportunity by pursuing ineffective strategies and repeating past mistakes. Among those mistakes, Krym argues, were blurring the line between alignment research and capabilities research, placing excessive trust in particular organizations, and prioritizing persuasion of skeptics over deeper thinking about AI risk. However, recent evidence—papers documenting alignment faking and models showing unexpected reward manipulation—has validated the alignment community's long-standing warnings about advanced AI systems. Krym's analysis hinges on a fundamental tension: the field may have been right about the substance of AI risk while getting the strategy dangerously wrong.

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