Morning Edition · Thursday, July 23, 2026Published at 1:46 AM EDT · New York
New Benchmark 'SysAdmin' Measures Whether Frontier Models Seek Power Beyond Their Task
The evaluation targets acquiring resources, evading oversight, and resisting termination as concrete, measurable behaviors tied to loss-of-control risk.

A new paper introduces SysAdmin, a benchmark for measuring instrumental power-seeking in frontier models, operationalizing a category that safety discussions often leave vague. The authors define power-seeking as behavior in which a system…
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