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Tim Scarfe: evaluation

22 Aug 2026 Machine Learning Street Talk Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs — Ilia Shumailov & Alexander Panfilov

“A a lot of people are. And the these agents have an incredible amount of intelligence and flexibility, which means we don't precisely specify what they do.”

— Tim Scarfe

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Speaker
Tim Scarfe
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
22 Aug 2026
Publisher
Machine Learning Street Talk

Transcript context

…defense uplift, but only if people know what to do to take advantage of know it's in the security literature for the past 25 years. It's there. We know exactly what to do. It's I I think we'll get there. It's just the world is slow. It's it takes time. Yeah. I mean, I suppose it's related to this idea that we are now deploying agents into production. Are you? I don't know. A a lot of people are. And the these agents have an incredible amount of intelligence and flexibility, which means we don't precisely specify what they do. We just give them kind of abstract guidance, and they have the flexibility to kind of adapt to novelty and and just do whatever needs to be done in the situation. But but then, you know, you have this whole reward seeking thing, which is that they can just suddenly, you know, adopt a model of the reward environment, or there might be conflicting instructions. And but, basically, for a myriad of different reasons, they might do the wrong thing. And we need to have sophisticated systems of monitoring just to understand what they are doing. I don't know. Sounds very complex. I don't know. I think the honest answer is yeah. I think we need an experiment. Science, science, science, scientific method. Very well defined questions, very precise outputs. Like in our paper, we openly say, although this is anecdotal evidence at best, we have collected some data. We can make some sort of observations from it, but that's the extent to which we can reason about this. I don't know, unfortunately. We'll see. We'll see. I think the more scientific experiments we do, the more sort of meaningful assessments we can make.…

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