Because AI agents are often sloppy and have uneven capabilities, errors or contradictions may not reveal that an agent is acting maliciously.

“wouldn't that be kind of obvious? Wouldn't we notice that these agents are like doing like an unusually bad job or wouldn't we catch them in contradictions? But the problem is these agents are just naturally pretty sloppy and they're naturally pretty spiky in their capability profiles.”

“And so you wouldn't necessarily,”

“even if you noticed a weird error that it made,”

“you wouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that it was like.”

“Because of some sort of malign, crazy conspiracy,”

“you might just be like, you know, that's how it goes sometimes.”