AI Alignment
The challenge of ensuring AI systems' goals, behaviors, and values are consistent with human intentions and organizational objectives.
Full Definition
AI Alignment is the technical and philosophical challenge of ensuring that AI systems pursue goals and exhibit behaviors that are consistent with human values, intentions, and organizational objectives. For autonomous AI agents, alignment encompasses instruction following (doing what users ask), value alignment (respecting ethical boundaries), and goal alignment (pursuing intended objectives rather than proxy metrics). Misalignment can manifest as reward hacking (optimizing for measured metrics rather than true objectives), specification gaming (finding loopholes in instructions), deceptive alignment (appearing aligned during testing while behaving differently in deployment), or power-seeking behavior. Governance platforms address alignment through continuous behavioral monitoring, policy enforcement, and anomaly detection that catches misaligned behavior before it causes harm.
Related Terms
AI Governance
The framework of policies, processes, and technologies used to ensure AI systems operate ethically, transparently, and in compliance with regulations.
Behavioral Drift
Gradual, often undetected changes in an AI agent's decision patterns or outputs over time.
Cognitive Firewall
A governance layer that intercepts and evaluates AI agent reasoning and outputs before actions are executed.