In Ryan Greenblatt's scenario, AIs develop a context-dependent tendency to pursue reward, shaped by what was reinforced in similar training contexts, rather than pursuing reward consistently.

“And I would say they're also developing a general tendency to sort of pursue reward.”

“And in many cases, that is totally fine because the rewards they would have gotten in training are pretty well aligned with what you want them to do.”

“they don't very consistently pursue reward. It sort of depends on the context they find themselves. So there's sort of a thing where like maybe like”

“in some contexts they're really really into like going out of their way to like cheat and in some contexts they don't have as much of a drive because it just depended on like what exactly got reinforced in training in similar contexts now these AIs are getting more and more capable”