Intro

Reasoning models like Deepseek r1:

• Can reason in consequentialist ways and have vast knowledge about AI training
• Can reason for many serial steps, with enough slack to think about takeover plans
• Sometimes reward hack

If you had told this to my 2022 self without specifying anything else about scheming models, I might have put a non-negligible probability on such AIs scheming (i.e. strategically performing well in training in order to protect their long-term goals).

Despite this, the scratchpads of current reasoning models do not contain traces of scheming in regular training environments - even when there is no harmlessness pressure on the scratchpads like in Deepseek-r1-Zero.

In this post, I argue that:

• Classic explanations for the absence of scheming (in non-wildly superintelligent AIs) like the ones listed in Joe Carlsmith's scheming report only partially rule out scheming in models like Deepseek r1;
• There are other explanations for why Deepseek r1 doesn’t scheme that are often absent from past armchair reasoning about scheming:
  • The human-like pretraining prior is mostly benign and applies to some intermediate steps of reasoning: it puts a very low probability on helpful-but-scheming agents doing things like trying very hard to solve math and [...]

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Outline:

(04:08) Classic reasons to expect AIs to not be schemers

(04:14) Speed priors

(06:11) Preconditions for scheming not being met

(08:27) There are indirect pressures against scheming on intermediate steps of reasoning

(09:07) Human priors on intermediate steps of reasoning

(11:43) Correlation between short and long reasoning

(13:07) Other pressures

(13:48) Rewards are not so cursed as to strongly incentivize scheming

(13:54) Maximizing rewards teaches you things mostly independent of scheming

(14:46) Using situational awareness to get higher reward is hard

(16:45) Maximizing rewards doesn't push you far away from the human prior

(18:07) Will it be different for future rewards?

(19:32) Meta-level update and conclusion

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
November 20th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HYCGA2p4bBG68Yufh/thinking-about-reasoning-models-made-me-less-worried-about

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.