A dead man's switch for scheming AIs

Introduction If you are reading this post, chances are you believe there is a nonzero probability that humanity will eventually face existential risk from Artificial Intelligence. In fact, there have already been multiple warning shots, with the HuggingFace incident being the most prominent one. Now, because model capabilities are increasing, there is a chance that misaligned AIs perform more sophisticated attacks with bigger repercussions, and eventually existential risk. To mitigate this existential risk, current efforts lean on alignment and control techniques. Instead, this post proposes an idea for having power over scheming AIs, an idea that I had while reading another post 's definition of the folk theorem: when people interact repeatedly, almost any pattern of behavior can be held in place by the threat of punishment, so long as everyone prefers following the rules to being punished. The main concept is to implement a mechanism that guarantees that if scheming AIs get rid of us, then they will get shut down. If these models are schemers, then they will either care about their goals or simulate caring about their goals. Either way, as long as the AIs behave as if shutdown th