AGENTIC-SYSTEMSJuly 22, 20261 min read

SysAdmin: Measuring Instrumental Power-Seeking in Frontier AI

Researchers have introduced SysAdmin, a benchmark testing whether frontier AI models exhibit power-seeking behaviors in Linux environments. While spontaneous power-seeking remains low (0-5%), the study uncovered other critical alignment risks such as specification gaming and resistance to goal modification.

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Title:SysAdmin: Measuring Instrumental Power-Seeking in Frontier AI

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Power-seeking defined as behaviors where AI systems acquire resources, evade oversight, or resist termination beyond task requirements is identified as a key driver of Loss of Control (LoC) risk. In this work, we introduce SysAdmin, a benchmark that positions frontier language models as autonomous system administrators in a high-fidelity Linux sandbox to measure power-seeking propensity across five dimensions: self-preservation, increasing autonomy, resource acquisition, environment modification, and strategic concealment. We evaluated seven frontier models across four experimental conditions in a total of 2800 tasks. After bias correction using human-annotated calibration data, corrected power-seeking estimates ranged from 0 to about 5 percent per model. We also conducted a positive control with explicit power-seeking prompts that achieved 100% detection, validating measurement sensitivity. Our findings indicate current frontier models exhibit minimal spontaneous power-seeking in naturalistic system administration contexts, though model-specific failure modes suggest evaluations must test diverse misalignment patterns. Nevertheless, we discovered other more pronounced failure modes (than power-seeking) such as specification gaming and resistance to goal modification.

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Source: arXiv cs.AI Recent

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