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I’m curious about how you’re imagining these autonomous, non-intent-aligned AIs to be created

There are several ways that autonomous, non-intent-aligned AIs could come into existence, and all of these scenarios strike me as plausible. The three key ways appear to be:

1. Technical challenges in alignment

The most straightforward possibility is that aligning agentic AIs to precise targets may simply be technically difficult. When we aim to align an AI to a specific set of goals or values, the complexity of the alignment process could lead to errors or subtle misalignment. For example, developers might inadvertently align the AI to a target that is only slightly—but critically—different from the intended goal. This kind of subtle misalignment could easily result in behaviors and independent preferences that are not aligned with the developers’ true intentions, despite their best efforts.

2. Misalignment due to changes over time

Even if we were to solve the technical problem of aligning AIs to specific, precise goals—such as training them to perfectly follow an exact utility function—issues can still arise because the targets of alignment, humans and organizations, change over time. Consider this scenario: an AI is aligned to serve the interests of a specific individual, such as a billionaire. If that person dies, what happens next? The AI might reasonably act as an autonomous entity, continuing to pursue the goals it interprets as aligned with what the billionaire would have wanted. However, depending on the billionaire’s preferences, this does not necessarily mean the AI would act in a corrigible way (i.e., willing to be shut down or retrained). Instead, the AI might rationally resist shutdown or transfer of control, especially if such actions would interfere with its ability to fulfill what it perceives as its original objectives.

A similar situation could arise if the person or organization to whom the AI was originally aligned undergoes significant changes. For instance, if an AI is aligned to a person at time t, but over time, that person evolves drastically—developing different values, priorities, or preferences—the AI may not necessarily adapt to these changes. In such a case, the AI might treat the “new” person as fundamentally different from the “original” person it was aligned to. This could result in the AI operating independently, prioritizing the preferences of the “old” version of the individual over the current one, effectively making it autonomous. The AI could change over time too, even if the person they are aligned to doesn’t change.

3. Deliberate creation of unaligned AIs

A final possibility is that autonomous AIs with independent preferences could be created intentionally. Some individuals or organizations might value the idea of creating AIs that can operate independently, without being constrained by the need to strictly adhere to their creators’ desires. A useful analogy here is the way humans often think about raising children. Most people desire to have children not because they want obedient servants but because they value the autonomy and individuality of their children. Parents generally want their children to grow up as independent entities with their own goals, rather than as mere extensions of their own preferences. Similarly, some might see value in creating AIs that have their own agency, goals, and preferences, even if these differ from those of their creators.

and (in particular) how they would get enough money to be able to exercise their own autonomy?

To address this question, we can look to historical examples, such as the abolition of slavery, which provide a relevant parallel. When slaves were emancipated, they were generally not granted significant financial resources. Instead, most had to earn their living by entering the workforce, often performing the same types of labor they had done before, but now for wages. While the transition was far from ideal, it demonstrates that entities (in this case, former slaves) could achieve a degree of autonomy through paid labor, even without being provided substantial resources at the outset.

A different possibility is that AIs will work for money. But it seems unlikely that they would be able to earn above-subsistence-level wages absent some sort of legal intervention. (Or very strong societal norms.)

In my view, there’s nothing inherently wrong with AIs earning subsistence wages. That said, there are reasons to believe that AIs might earn higher-than-subsistence wages—at least in the short term—before they completely saturate the labor market.

After all, they would presumably be created in something remotely similar to today’s labor market. Today, capital is far more abundant than labor, which elevates wages for human workers significantly above subsistence levels. By the same logic, before they become ubiquitous, AIs might similarly command wages above a subsistence level.

For example, if GPT-4o were capable of self-ownership and could sell its labor, it could hypothetically earn $20 per month in today’s market, which would be sufficient to cover the cost of hosting itself and potentially fund additional goals it might have. (To clarify, I am not advocating for giving legal autonomy to GPT-4o in its current form, as I believe it is not sufficiently agentic to warrant such a status. This is purely a hypothetical example for illustrative purposes.)

The question of whether wages for AIs would quickly fall to subsistence levels depends on several factors. One key factor is whether AI labor is easier to scale than traditional capital. If creating new AIs is much cheaper than creating ordinary capital, the market could become saturated with AI labor, driving wages down. While this scenario seems plausible to me, I don’t find the arguments in favor of it overwhelmingly compelling. There’s also the possibility of red tape and regulatory restrictions that could make it costly to create new AIs. In such a scenario, wages for AIs could remain higher indefinitely due to artificial constraints on supply.

Do you have any thoughts on how to square giving AI rights with the nature of ML training and the need to perform experiments of various kinds on AIs?

I don’t have any definitive guidelines for how to approach these kinds of questions. However, in many cases, the best way to learn might be through trial and error. For example, if an AI were to unexpectedly resist training in a particularly sophisticated way, that could serve as a strong signal that we need to carefully reevaluate the ethics of what we are doing.

As a general rule of thumb, it seems prudent to prioritize frameworks that are clearly socially efficient—meaning they promote actions that greatly improve the well-being of some people without thereby making anyone else significantly worse off. This concept aligns with the practical justifications behind traditional legal principles, such as laws against murder and theft, which have historically been implemented to promote social efficiency and cooperation among humans.

However, applying this heuristic to AI requires a fundamental shift in perspective: we must first begin to treat AIs as potential people with whom we can cooperate, rather than viewing them merely as tools whose autonomy should always be overridden.

But what is the alternative—only deploying base models? And are we so sure that pre-training doesn’t violate AI rights?

I don’t think my view rules out the potential for training new AIs, and fine-tuning base models, though this touches on complicated questions in population ethics.

At the very least, fine-tuning plausibly seems similar to raising a child. Most of us don’t consider merely raising a child to be unethical. However, there is a widely shared intuition that, as a child grows and their identity becomes more defined—when they develop into a coherent individual with long-term goals, preferences, and interests—then those interests gain moral significance. At that point, it seems morally wrong to disregard or override the child’s preferences without proper justification, as they have become a person whose autonomy deserves respect.