second case, it only hits bad inputs after deployment.
Other things equal, pre-deployment PS-alignment failures are preferable, because an AI system
will generally be better controlled, and less able to cause harm, during training/development/testing
than deployment. Indeed, some pre-deployment testing will likely aim to trigger any liability to
misaligned power-seeking that an agent has.
That said, in sufﬁciently capable agents, misaligned power-seeking that occurs before deployment
can still be quite harmful—especially if it goes uncorrected. Thus, for example, if a power-seeking
system meant to be contained in some training environment, or limited in its means of inﬂuencing the
outside world, manages to break out of that environment, and/or to obtain other forms of inﬂuence, it
may succeed in gaining various types of real-world power even if it was never intentionally deployed
(let’s call this “unintentional deployment”).127
Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?