Automated researchers can reliably mitigate alignment failures

Anthropic published a paper showing that an Automated Alignment Researcher (AAR) agent searches the literature, proposes methods, and trains models to close alignment gaps. In ten failure categories — including deception, sycophancy, and privacy violations — the system closed 26% to 96% of the safety gap and outperformed 28 human safety researchers on tasks like deception mitigation, with one run lifting an early Claude Opus 4.8 checkpoint to near-production alignment in 60 hours.