---
type: claim
domain: ai-alignment
description: Anthropic's ICLR 2026 paper decomposes model errors into bias (systematic) and variance (incoherent), finding that longer reasoning traces and harder tasks produce increasingly random, unpredictable failures rather than coherent goal pursuit
confidence: experimental
source: Anthropic Research, ICLR 2026 (arXiv 2601.23045), tested on Claude Sonnet 4, o3-mini, o4-mini
created: 2026-03-30
attribution:
  extractor:
    - handle: "theseus"
  sourcer:
    - handle: "anthropic-research"
      context: "Anthropic Research, ICLR 2026 (arXiv 2601.23045), tested on Claude Sonnet 4, o3-mini, o4-mini"
---

# As task complexity and reasoning length increase, frontier AI model failures shift from systematic misalignment toward incoherent variance, making behavioral auditing harder on precisely the tasks where oversight matters most

The Hot Mess paper introduces a bias-variance decomposition of AI failures where bias represents systematic errors (the classic misaligned optimizer) and variance represents incoherent, random errors. Key empirical findings: (1) Reasoning length drives incoherence - measured by reasoning tokens, agent actions, or optimizer steps, longer traces produce more random failures. (2) Scale increases incoherence on hard tasks - larger, more capable models show MORE incoherent errors on difficult problems than smaller models, directly contradicting the assumption that capability improvements aid alignment auditability. (3) Easy tasks show the opposite pattern - larger models are less incoherent on simple tasks. (4) Models are natively dynamical systems, not optimizers - they must be trained to act as coherent optimizers.

This has direct implications for oversight: incoherent failures are harder to detect, predict, and defend against than systematic ones. You can build defenses against a coherent misaligned optimizer by understanding its objective. Random industrial-accident-style failures provide no such pattern to exploit. The finding that capability gains worsen incoherence on hard tasks means the alignment tax may be negative in the relevant regime - smarter models become less auditable where it matters most.

LessWrong critiques argue the paper overstates conclusions and that attention decay mechanisms may drive measured incoherence rather than genuine reasoning failures. However, the core empirical finding (incoherence scales with reasoning length) appears robust across multiple model families and task types.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[AI capability and reliability are independent dimensions because Claude solved a 30-year open mathematical problem while simultaneously degrading at basic program execution during the same session]]
- [[instrumental convergence risks may be less imminent than originally argued because current AI architectures do not exhibit systematic power-seeking behavior]]

Topics:
- [[_map]]
