Instrumental convergence and power-seeking
Recent years have seen increasing concern that artificial intelligence may soon pose an existential risk to humanity. One leading ground for concern is that artificial agents may be power-seeking, aiming to acquire power and in the process disempowering humanity. I show how the argument from power-seeking rests on a strong version of a claim known as the instrumental convergence thesis. I explore leading defenses of the instrumental convergence thesis and argue that none establishes the thesis i
Record details
Published: 7 June 2026
Source: arXiv
Category: Research
Topics: Safety & alignment · Agents & autonomy
Retrieved: 14 July 2026
Related evidence
These records share source-supplied organisations, an exact publisher byline, automatic topics or regions. The reason is shown on every link; related does not mean supporting, agreeing with or verifying this record.
Agent Economics: An Entropy-Controlled Pluralistic Alignment Framework for Preventing Artificial Hivemind in Autonomous Agents
arXiv · 8 June 2026
GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation
arXiv · 7 June 2026
PACT: Self-Evolving Physical Safety Alignment for Diffusion Policies in Embodied Manipulation
arXiv · 7 June 2026
Aligned but Not Partner-Specific: Distinguishing How Multimodal LLM Agents Succeed in Reference Games Without Human-Like Conventions
arXiv · 6 June 2026
IEA: Amateur-Friendly Conversational Image Editing Agent via Three Stages of Multitask Alignment
arXiv · 6 June 2026
The Arbiter Agent: Continually Monitoring Multi-Agent Conversations to Detect Emergent Misalignment
arXiv · 9 June 2026
How to cite this record
ethics.ai (7 June 2026), “Instrumental convergence and power-seeking,” evidence record 1278, https://ethics.ai/record/1278 (originally published by arXiv).
Use and limitations
This page is a stable index and citation surface for a source record. ethics.ai did not author the underlying report and has not independently verified every claim. Automatic topics may be imperfect. For consequential use, quote and cite the original publisher.