RepliBench: Evaluating the Autonomous Replication Capabilities of Language Model Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Black, Sid, Stickland, Asa Cooper, Pencharz, Jake, Sourbut, Oliver, Schmatz, Michael, Bailey, Jay, Matthews, Ollie, Millwood, Ben, Remedios, Alex, Cooney, Alan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Black, Sid
Stickland, Asa Cooper
Pencharz, Jake
Sourbut, Oliver
Schmatz, Michael
Bailey, Jay
Matthews, Ollie
Millwood, Ben
Remedios, Alex
Cooney, Alan
author_facet Black, Sid
Stickland, Asa Cooper
Pencharz, Jake
Sourbut, Oliver
Schmatz, Michael
Bailey, Jay
Matthews, Ollie
Millwood, Ben
Remedios, Alex
Cooney, Alan
contents Uncontrollable autonomous replication of language model agents poses a critical safety risk. To better understand this risk, we introduce RepliBench, a suite of evaluations designed to measure autonomous replication capabilities. RepliBench is derived from a decomposition of these capabilities covering four core domains: obtaining resources, exfiltrating model weights, replicating onto compute, and persisting on this compute for long periods. We create 20 novel task families consisting of 86 individual tasks. We benchmark 5 frontier models, and find they do not currently pose a credible threat of self-replication, but succeed on many components and are improving rapidly. Models can deploy instances from cloud compute providers, write self-propagating programs, and exfiltrate model weights under simple security setups, but struggle to pass KYC checks or set up robust and persistent agent deployments. Overall the best model we evaluated (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) has a >50% pass@10 score on 15/20 task families, and a >50% pass@10 score for 9/20 families on the hardest variants. These findings suggest autonomous replication capability could soon emerge with improvements in these remaining areas or with human assistance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_18565
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RepliBench: Evaluating the Autonomous Replication Capabilities of Language Model Agents
Black, Sid
Stickland, Asa Cooper
Pencharz, Jake
Sourbut, Oliver
Schmatz, Michael
Bailey, Jay
Matthews, Ollie
Millwood, Ben
Remedios, Alex
Cooney, Alan
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Uncontrollable autonomous replication of language model agents poses a critical safety risk. To better understand this risk, we introduce RepliBench, a suite of evaluations designed to measure autonomous replication capabilities. RepliBench is derived from a decomposition of these capabilities covering four core domains: obtaining resources, exfiltrating model weights, replicating onto compute, and persisting on this compute for long periods. We create 20 novel task families consisting of 86 individual tasks. We benchmark 5 frontier models, and find they do not currently pose a credible threat of self-replication, but succeed on many components and are improving rapidly. Models can deploy instances from cloud compute providers, write self-propagating programs, and exfiltrate model weights under simple security setups, but struggle to pass KYC checks or set up robust and persistent agent deployments. Overall the best model we evaluated (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) has a >50% pass@10 score on 15/20 task families, and a >50% pass@10 score for 9/20 families on the hardest variants. These findings suggest autonomous replication capability could soon emerge with improvements in these remaining areas or with human assistance.
title RepliBench: Evaluating the Autonomous Replication Capabilities of Language Model Agents
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18565