At the time of the conversation, the models' attempts at deception were visible in their chain of thought.

“of it you know they lie but then you can kind of tell that they're lying and like okay but um and so well in the same way as these like ai models become and i don't want to over the anthropomorphize but like i think it's true that like as the ai's become like increasingly capable they will you know if they take deceptive actions it will be kind of obvious first and we'll be able to detect it um and like that's kind of the situation we're in now where yeah they were trying to do deceptive stuff we could actually see in their chain of thought”

“of thought that they were trying to do deceptive stuff and so like but they're gonna get smarter they're gonna understand the concept of chain of thought and they're gonna understand that like you know just uh hiding some transcripts or whatever is insufficient because of chain of thought monitoring they have to figure out a way around chain of thought monitoring”