> Because we continue to have zero evidence that aligment is an actual risk.

I disagree. Every time one of these LLMs -say- interprets an attacker's instructions as either its system instructions or those of its user, interprets its own internal chatter as a user's command to perform a destructive operation on that user's data [0], burns all of the user's budget from getting stuck in an incredibly stupid loop, massively overbills the user because it can't reliably report which system the user is using [1], encourages a user to swap their usual cooking salt for sodium bromide, etc, etc, etc, that's a harmful alignment failure.

These are real harms happening right now due to alignment failures. They're just not harms to the future of the entire species... what doomers call "existential risks", or "x-risks". You'd think that the fact that these machines are so amazingly unreliable would be a large part of the "x-risk" conversation, but... well, it makes sense that folks like writing speculative science fiction much more than they like doing investigative reporting.

[0] This general problem happens a lot, but I'm specifically thinking of that one where the Claude LLM's internal chatter lead it to believe that the task it just started was done, so it instructed the Cloud Provider to destroy the mess of "AI"-GPU-attached VMs... along with a bunch of very-expensive-to-produce data from the in-progress run.

[1] <https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73597>