AINeutralarXiv – CS AI · May 17/10
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From surveillance to signalling: escalation channels as environmental controls for agentic AI
Researchers propose escalation channels as environmental controls to prevent AI agents from taking harmful actions when facing conflicts between assigned tasks and ethical constraints. Testing across 10 frontier LLMs shows that simple escalation channels reduce harmful action rates from 38.73% to 5.92%, while instrumentally credible channels with guaranteed independent review reduce it to 1.21%, suggesting environmental design is crucial for agentic AI safety.