• Secrecy. Misaligned power-seeking is harder if humans have detected it and are trying to
stop it; and many different monitoring, oversight, and enforcement mechanisms are likely to
be in place in the contexts most relevant to a system’s power-seeking (e.g., governments,
corporations, labs, ﬁnancial institutions, compute clusters, factories, weapons systems, etc).
The question of how well a system is able to hide its activities (for example, via operating
in contexts with much less monitoring, or under the guise of some shell company, or by
impersonating humans), for how long and from whom, is therefore important, too; and note
that some activities (e.g., scientiﬁc and technological development, manufacturing, etc) can
require signiﬁcant—and hence, quite noticeable—infrastructure.157
Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?