Shutdownable Agents through POST-Agency

Elliott Thornley

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arXiv · 2505.20203

Shutdownable Agents through POST-Agency

Elliott Thornley

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Abstract

Many fear that future artificial agents will resist shutdown. I present an idea - the POST-Agents Proposal - for ensuring that doesn't happen. I propose that we train agents to satisfy Preferences Only Between Same-Length Trajectories (POST). I then prove that POST - together with other conditions - implies Neutrality+: the agent maximizes expected utility, ignoring the probability distribution over trajectory-lengths. I argue that Neutrality+ keeps agents shutdownable and allows them to be useful.

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Elliott Thornley. 2025-05-26. Shutdownable Agents through POST-Agency. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20203

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