  Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked growing
concerns among experts, policymakers, and world leaders regarding the potential
for increasingly advanced AI systems to pose existential risks. This paper
reviews the evidence for existential risks from AI via misalignment, where AI
systems develop goals misaligned with human values, and power-seeking, where
misaligned AIs actively seek power. The review examines empirical findings,
conceptual arguments and expert opinion relating to specification gaming, goal
misgeneralization, and power-seeking. The current state of the evidence is
found to be concerning but inconclusive regarding the existence of extreme
forms of misaligned power-seeking. Strong empirical evidence of specification
gaming combined with strong conceptual evidence for power-seeking make it
difficult to dismiss the possibility of existential risk from misaligned
power-seeking. On the other hand, to date there are no public empirical
examples of misaligned power-seeking in AI systems, and so arguments that
future systems will pose an existential risk remain somewhat speculative. Given
the current state of the evidence, it is hard to be extremely confident either
that misaligned power-seeking poses a large existential risk, or that it poses
no existential risk. The fact that we cannot confidently rule out existential
risk from AI via misaligned power-seeking is cause for serious concern.
