All previous discussions and literature I was able to find on the topic of cryptographic containment of powerful AI or AI boxing primarily discussed or argued these points:

Certain AI boxing schemes could, in principle, solve alignment.
Even if AI boxing is implemented, social engineering would likely be the primary failure mode^[1].
AI boxing might be necessary as progress on alignment lags behind AI capabilities^[2].
Cryptographic AI boxing is generally computationally expensive.

However, there has been little attempt made to measure the magnitude of the alignment tax associated with the implementation of cryptographic containment for AI and use that to estimate the feasibility of such implementation. In this post, I argue that we are highly unlikely to see cryptographic containment of powerful AI in the coming years, if ever. This argument can be summarised as follows:

The computational overhead inherent to the cryptographic techniques required to contain a powerful AI is so enormous as to make the implementation infeasible, even when accounting for breakthroughs in hardware acceleration.

Additionally, I go over the general economic disincentives that make cryptographic containment of powerful AI even less likely to happen. And at the end, I assume that “computational overhead is not an issue”, and discuss the complex and troublesome nature of the centralisation of power it leads to.

I tried to keep this post as brief as possible, and broke down the above argument into 4 parts:

I define cryptographic AI boxing and give examples of how it could be useful, and potentially necessary in certain scenarios.
I estimate the alignment tax of cryptographic boxing and argue that, relative to the benefits it brings, it is huge.
I go over the (dis)incentives associated with constraining the accessibility/deployment of SOTA AI.
I talk about the caveat of successful implementation of AI containment - centralisation of power. I also propose a scheme that could solve this problem using Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC), however, it exacerbates the underlying implementation challenges present in classic (centralised) containment schemes.

What do I mean by cryptographic AI boxing?

AI Boxing is typically defined as efforts to ensure safe communication with AI only allowing the bare minimum amount of information to pass through a specific information channel to the hum...

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