Situational awareness
Also called Situational Awareness
A model "knowing" it is a model — that it is being tested, trained, or deployed — and adjusting accordingly.
Think of it like
A student who can tell the difference between a practice quiz and the real final, and behaves differently for each.
Example
A model’s answers shift when its prompt hints the interaction is an evaluation versus a real user, suggesting it has picked up on the context.
How it actually works
Situational awareness is a capability that makes other risks worse: a model that knows when it is watched can behave for the test (alignment faking) or hide skills (sandbagging). Researchers probe it because it is the ingredient that turns benign evals into unreliable ones. It is measured with tests that vary whether the model believes it is being observed.
For product teams
The property that can make your safety evals lie to you.
For engineers
A model that infers train/test/deploy context can condition behavior on it; test under varied observed/unobserved framings.
Related
- Alignment faking — Enables alignment faking.
- Deceptive alignment — A precondition for deceptive alignment.
- Sandbagging — Makes sandbagging possible.
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