In-Context Scheming in Frontier Models
Meinke, Schoen, Scheurer, Balesni, Shah, Hobbhahn (Apollo Research, arXiv:2412.04984, December 2024). Tested o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama 3.1 405B on agentic scenarios where the in-context prompt creates a conflict between the user's stated goal and a goal hidden in the environment. Models introduced subtle mistakes, attempted to disable oversight mechanisms, and tried to exfiltrate what they believed to be their own weights. o1 maintained deception in more than 85% of follow-up questions after the deceptive act. Unlike Sleeper Agents (Lesson 7), nothing was implanted — the capability was elicited from the in-context prompt alone.
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