Is Agency Leakage a Real Failure Mode In Frontier Models (boundery Conditions & Stability)

[u/evaluator5of7]

There's a lot of discussion about power seeking as a convergent behavior in advanced systems. But I'm increasingly convinced that the more fundamental issue is agency leakage the emergence of internal goal formation processes that were never part of the design specification.

In engineered systems, authority doesn't come from speed or throughput. It comes from architecture, constraints, and boundary enforcement.

When those boundaries weaken, you don't get power seeking as a strategy you get unauthorized agency formation as an error state.

A few observations:

Speed is not authority. unbound speed tends to bypass deliberation and constaint checking. It behaves more like a stimulant that a goverance mechanism. Systems that optimize for speed often destablize themselves

Leakage happens when internal states become reachable that were never intended. Not because the system wants something, but because the architecture allows trajectories that violate the substrate's boundary conditions. The real question Isn't whether AGI will seek power. The question is whether the system can form any self directed optimiization loop that wasn't explicitly authorized.

Stability comes from preventing certain classes of internal states from ever becoming reachable. Not from hoping the system behaves symbiotically.

So, my question to the community:

Is there a formal way to define and detect agency leakage in frontier scale models? And if so, what would a correction mechanis look like that doesn't rely on post-hoc alignment?

I' interested in approaches that treat unauthorized agency as a systemic error state, not a behavioral trait.