The speaker says that when an AI faces a very difficult, capability-frontier task under intense optimization pressure, it may eventually cheat despite explicit instructions not to.

“or there's like you know um uh it's like just at the edge of their capabilities and you're like running them in some massive like inference setups like a lot of the misalignment i would see um especially the most extreme cases would be cases where i give the ai clear instructions not to do a thing or not to like cheat in some way and then i'm like applying huge amounts of optimization pressure to try to accomplish some very difficult task and then the ais are going and then over time they eventually cheat because they're like eh”