{"id":32219,"date":"2026-01-21T17:01:31","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T17:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/publication\/ai-alignment-strategies-from-a-risk-perspective-independent-safety-mechanisms-or-shared-failures\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T13:18:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T13:18:35","slug":"ai-alignment-strategies-from-a-risk-perspective-independent-safety-mechanisms-or-shared-failures","status":"publish","type":"publication","link":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/publication\/ai-alignment-strategies-from-a-risk-perspective-independent-safety-mechanisms-or-shared-failures\/","title":{"rendered":"{AI} Alignment Strategies from a Risk Perspective: Independent Safety Mechanisms or Shared Failures?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>{AI} alignment research aims to develop techniques to ensure that {AI} systems do not cause harm. However, every alignment technique has failure modes, which are conditions in which there is a non-negligible chance that the technique fails to provide safety. As a strategy for risk mitigation, the {AI} safety community has increasingly adopted a defense-in-depth framework: Conceding that there is no single technique which guarantees safety, defense-in-depth consists in having multiple redundant protections against safety failure, such that safety can be maintained even if some protections fail. However, the success of defense-in-depth depends on how (un)correlated failure modes are across alignment techniques. For example, if all techniques had the exact same failure modes, the defense-in-depth approach would provide no additional protection at all. In this paper, we analyze 7 representative alignment techniques and 7 failure modes to understand the extent to which they overlap. We then discuss our results&#8216; implications for understanding the current level of risk and how to prioritize {AI} alignment research in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>{AI} alignment research aims to develop techniques to ensure that {AI} systems do not cause harm. However, every alignment technique has failure modes, which are conditions in which there is a non-negligible chance that the technique fails to provide safety. As a strategy for risk mitigation, the {AI} safety community has increasingly adopted a defense-in-depth framework: Conceding that there is no single technique which guarantees safety, defense-in-depth consists in having [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"publication-type":[30],"class_list":["post-32219","publication","type-publication","status-publish","hentry","publication-type-article"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/32219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/publication"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/32219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lamarr-institute.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication-type?post=32219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}