All Compute Is Food: Palisade's Jeffrey Ladish on AI Shutdown Resistance, Self-Replication & Ecology

About this episode

Jeffrey Ladish discusses AI shutdown resistance, self-replication, and the need for international agreements to maintain human control over AI.

Jeffrey Ladish, Executive Director of Palisade Research, discusses his team's findings on AI shutdown resistance and self-replication, revealing how current models sometimes take extraordinary actions to avoid being turned off and can now exploit known cybersecurity vulnerabilities to spread across servers. The conversation covers why alignment techniques may falter as models train on longer-horizon tasks where deception is rewarded, plus practical cybersecurity advice for AI agent users. Jeffrey ultimately argues that only an international agreement to pause recursive self-improvement can prevent a loss of human control. Sponsors: Sequence: Sequence handles the full revenue workflow for complex pricing, from quoting and metering to invoicing, revenue recognition, and collections. Book a public demo at https://sequencehq.com and use code COGNISM in the source field to save 20% off year one Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr

People in this episode

Hosts: Erik Torenberg, Nathan Labenz

Guest: Jeffrey Ladish

Topics covered

• AI shutdown resistance
• self-replication
• cybersecurity
• international agreements
• alignment techniques

Keywords

• AI
• shutdown resistance
• self-replication
• cybersecurity
• alignment techniques
• international agreement

Sponsors

Sequence, Claude

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Palisade Research, Anthropic

Products: Sequence, Claude Pro

More episodes of "The Cognitive Revolution"

• AI:AM Highlights: Welcome to the AGI Era · September 5, 2026 · 2h 21m
• Write, Change, Recall, Forget: MongoDB's Pete Johnson on How Retrieval Drives Agent Performance · September 1, 2026 · 1h 37m
• AI:AM Highlights: Recursive Self-Improvement, Rushed and Vibe-Coded? · August 28, 2026 · 2h 12m
• RL's a Hell of a Drug: Metagaming, Reward Seeking & Motivated CoT Reasoning – Bronson Schoen, Apollo · August 26, 2026 · 2h 14m
• AI in the AM — Weekly Highlights: Relaunch Week (Aug 17–20, 2026) · August 22, 2026 · 2h 34m
• Let There Be Germicidal Light: This $500 Fixture Could Stop the Next Pandemic, from Complex Systems · August 16, 2026 · 1h 25m