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The Polylog AI Intelligence Brief

Morning Edition · Wednesday, July 22, 2026Published at 1:47 AM EDT · New York

A New Benchmark Tries to Measure Whether Frontier Models Seek Power

SysAdmin scores instrumental behaviors, acquiring resources, evading oversight, and resisting shutdown, as a proxy for loss-of-control risk.

A New Benchmark Tries to Measure Whether Frontier Models Seek Power

A new arXiv paper introduces SysAdmin, a benchmark that operationalizes instrumental power-seeking, defined as behavior in which an AI system acquires resources, evades oversight, or resists termination beyond what its assigned task require…

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Oversight and Evaluation Lag Accelerating AI Capabilities

Over the next 3-6 months, evidence mounts that governance, evaluation, and agent-safety methods are failing to keep pace with capability growth, driving investment in interpretability, agent-manipulation benchmarks, and institutional-reform proposals.