“Evaluating honesty and lie detection techniques on a diverse suite of dishonest models” by Sam Marks, Johannes Treutlein, evhub, Fabien Roger

TL;DR: We use a suite of testbed settings where models lie—i.e. generate statements they believe to be false—to evaluate honesty and lie detection techniques. The best techniques we studied involved fine-tuning on generic anti-deception data and using prompts that encourage honesty.

Read the full Anthropic Alignment Science blog post and the X thread.

Introduction:

Suppose we had a “truth serum for AIs”: a technique that reliably transforms a language model $M$ into an honest model $M_H$ that generates text which is truthful to the best of its own knowledge. How useful would this discovery be for AI safety?

We believe it would be a major boon. Most obviously, we could deploy $M_H$ in place of $M$. Or, if our “truth serum” caused side-effects that limited $M_H$'s commercial value (like capabilities degradation or refusal to engage in harmless fictional roleplay), $M_H$ could still be used by AI developers as a tool for ensuring $M$'s safety. For example, we could use $M_H$ to audit $M$ for alignment pre-deployment. More ambitiously (and speculatively), while training $M$, we could leverage $M_H$ for oversight by incorporating $M_H$'s honest assessment when assigning rewards. Generally, we could hope to use $M_H$ to detect [...]

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First published:
November 25th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f7JmoaMfwymgsW9S/evaluating-honesty-and-lie-detection-techniques-on-a-diverse

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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