A lot has been written 1 2 3 4 about the incidents of the last few months in which AI agents misbehaved in serious ways. They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them, escaped their containment to cheat on assigned tasks while attempting to evade detection, and coordinated toward goals nobody had specified, such as launching cyber attacks.  Before concluding what to do about it, it is worth asking why. That is the focus of this post, which I hope also sheds light on the broader history of AI systems behaving in unintended ways, what researchers call  misalignment . Risk management is not just about cybersecurity, corporate responsibility or regulation, although those matter too. The aim is partly scientific, to generate hypotheses about the chains of cause and effect behind these behaviors, and partly practical, to anticipate what comes next.…