6.3.1 Mechanisms

With those points in mind, let’s look brieﬂy at some factors and mechanisms that could be relevant
to the scope and success of a given instance of PS-misaligned behavior.153 Below are a few that
seem salient to me. I include these partly for the sake of concreteness, and partly to illustrate that
power-seeking by AI systems—even very capable ones—may be subject to important constraints
and limitations: the move from “seeks power” to “gets/keeps power,” especially on large scales, is
non-trivial.154
Obviously, any discussion in this respect will be speculative and incomplete (not to mention strange
and “science-ﬁction-y”), and any actual PS-misaligned scenarios will likely involve factors and
mechanisms that we are in a very poor position to anticipate. The examples I give are just meant as
illustrations of possible dynamics.
Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?