Buck Shlegeris - Opening session

Buck Shlegeris (Redwood Research) opens ControlConf 2026 with a working definition of AI control as mitigating risk from goal-directed misalignment given that it has already arisen, asking of any safety technique whether it would still work if the model were actively trying to subvert it. He surveys what has changed in a year: defer-to-resample, a technique Redwood proposed speculatively, now ships in Claude Code's auto mode; OpenAI reports chain-of-thought monitors covering roughly 99.9% of internal agentic traffic; sabotage evaluations like SHADE-Arena have made it into system cards; and external red teaming of company control systems has begun in earnest. He then maps where control actually bites in the AI Futures trajectory, arguing it matters most between superhuman coder and ASI, and that its core target is early scheming risk where a model establishes a persistent rogue deployment, sabotages its successor's alignment, and the situation compounds from there. The harder section is his open questions for the field, where he is explicit that he is uncertain. How much to prioritize myopic interventions like better sandboxing versus techniques that only matter later, especially given his guess that chain-of-thought monitoring will be useless by the point of automated AI R&D. Whether the field is overinvesting in pushing out the safety-usefulness Pareto frontier when the binding constraint may be safety budget, the share of company resources leadership will spend on safety at all. And whether the evaluability of control methods to outside reviewers should weigh as heavily as their actual effectiveness, given the pull toward safety theater as stakes grow. He closes by saying he thinks the field, himself included, is largely running on momentum from ideas that seemed good two years ago, and that reconsidering priorities now may matter more than any single research bet. Note: The opinions shared in this event are those of the speaker(s) and may not represent the views of FAR.AI or their affiliated organizations.