Seliem El-Sayed

Canfer Akbulut, Rasmi Elasmar, Abhishek Roy et al.

Interest in the concept of AI-driven harmful manipulation is growing, yet current approaches to evaluating it are limited. This paper introduces a framework for evaluating harmful AI manipulation via context-specific human-AI interaction studies. We illustrate the utility of this framework by assessing an AI model with 10,101 participants spanning interactions in three AI use domains (public policy, finance, and health) and three locales (US, UK, and India). Overall, we find that that the tested model can produce manipulative behaviours when prompted to do so and, in experimental settings, is able to induce belief and behaviour changes in study participants. We further find that context matters: AI manipulation differs between domains, suggesting that it needs to be evaluated in the high-stakes context(s) in which an AI system is likely to be used. We also identify significant differences across our tested geographies, suggesting that AI manipulation results from one geographic region may not generalise to others. Finally, we find that the frequency of manipulative behaviours (propensity) of an AI model is not consistently predictive of the likelihood of manipulative success (efficacy), underscoring the importance of studying these dimensions separately. To facilitate adoption of our evaluation framework, we detail our testing protocols and make relevant materials publicly available. We conclude by discussing open challenges in evaluating harmful manipulation by AI models.

Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

Mary Phuong, Matthew Aitchison, Elliot Catt et al. · deepmind

To understand the risks posed by a new AI system, we must understand what it can and cannot do. Building on prior work, we introduce a programme of new "dangerous capability" evaluations and pilot them on Gemini 1.0 models. Our evaluations cover four areas: (1) persuasion and deception; (2) cyber-security; (3) self-proliferation; and (4) self-reasoning. We do not find evidence of strong dangerous capabilities in the models we evaluated, but we flag early warning signs. Our goal is to help advance a rigorous science of dangerous capability evaluation, in preparation for future models.

Seliem El-Sayed, Canfer Akbulut, Amanda McCroskery et al.

Recent generative AI systems have demonstrated more advanced persuasive capabilities and are increasingly permeating areas of life where they can influence decision-making. Generative AI presents a new risk profile of persuasion due the opportunity for reciprocal exchange and prolonged interactions. This has led to growing concerns about harms from AI persuasion and how they can be mitigated, highlighting the need for a systematic study of AI persuasion. The current definitions of AI persuasion are unclear and related harms are insufficiently studied. Existing harm mitigation approaches prioritise harms from the outcome of persuasion over harms from the process of persuasion. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for the systematic study of AI persuasion. We first put forward definitions of persuasive generative AI. We distinguish between rationally persuasive generative AI, which relies on providing relevant facts, sound reasoning, or other forms of trustworthy evidence, and manipulative generative AI, which relies on taking advantage of cognitive biases and heuristics or misrepresenting information. We also put forward a map of harms from AI persuasion, including definitions and examples of economic, physical, environmental, psychological, sociocultural, political, privacy, and autonomy harm. We then introduce a map of mechanisms that contribute to harmful persuasion. Lastly, we provide an overview of approaches that can be used to mitigate against process harms of persuasion, including prompt engineering for manipulation classification and red teaming. Future work will operationalise these mitigations and study the interaction between different types of mechanisms of persuasion.