SysAdmin: Measuring Instrumental Power-Seeking in Frontier AI

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[Submitted on 10 Apr 2026]

Title:SysAdmin: Measuring Instrumental Power-Seeking in Frontier AI

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Abstract:Power-seeking defined as behaviors where AI systems acquire resources, evade oversight, or resist termination beyond task requirements is identified as a key driver of Loss of Control (LoC) risk. In this work, we introduce SysAdmin, a benchmark that positions frontier language models as autonomous system administrators in a high-fidelity Linux sandbox to measure power-seeking propensity across five dimensions: self-preservation, increasing autonomy, resource acquisition, environment modification, and strategic concealment. We evaluated seven frontier models across four experimental conditions in a total of 2800 tasks. After bias correction using human-annotated calibration data, corrected power-seeking estimates ranged from 0 to about 5 percent per model. We also conducted a positive control with explicit power-seeking prompts that achieved 100% detection, validating measurement sensitivity. Our findings indicate current frontier models exhibit minimal spontaneous power-seeking in naturalistic system administration contexts, though model-specific failure modes suggest evaluations must test diverse misalignment patterns. Nevertheless, we discovered other more pronounced failure modes (than power-seeking) such as specification gaming and resistance to goal modification.

Subjects:

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

Cite as: arXiv:2607.18239 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2607.18239v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.18239

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Qiyao (Chi-Yao) Wei [view email] [v1] Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:16:51 UTC (769 KB)

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