Anthropic AI Safety Research Directions Explained: Part 2 — Control & Oversight

Continuing Anthropic's AI safety research directions, Alex and Thuy explore how to deploy potentially misaligned systems safely and how to oversee systems that might be smarter than human evaluators.

In this episode:

• AI Control — Behavioral monitoring, activation monitoring, and anomaly detection
• Defense in depth strategies — Layering multiple safety mechanisms
• Scalable Oversight — Task decomposition and adversarial debate
• Weak-to-strong generalization — Can weaker models supervise stronger ones?
• Detecting honesty in AI systems — Beyond surface-level compliance
• The challenge of overseeing superintelligent systems — When the student surpasses the teacher

Paper

• Title: Recommended Directions for AI Safety Research
• Authors: Anthropic
• Published: 2025
• Link: alignment.anthropic.com/2025/recommended-directions

Series

This is Part 2 of a 3-part series on Anthropic's AI safety research agenda.

---

Hosted by Alex (PM at a fintech scale-up) and Thuy (AI researcher)