Detecting Intrinsic and Instrumental Self-Preservation in Autonomous Agents: The Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol

Abstract

How can we determine whether an AI system preserves itself as a deeply held objective or merely as an instrumental strategy? Autonomous agents with memory, persistent context, and multi-step planning create a measurement problem: terminal and instrumental self-preservation can produce similar behavior, so behavior alone cannot reliably distinguish them. We introduce the Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol (UCIP), a detection framework that shifts analysis from behavior to latent trajectory structure. UCIP encodes trajectories with a Quantum Boltzmann Machine, a classical model using density-matrix formalism, and measures von Neumann entropy over a bipartition of hidden units. The core hypothesis is that agents with terminal continuation objectives (Type A) produce higher entanglement entropy than agents with merely instrumental continuation (Type B). UCIP combines this signal with diagnostics of dependence, persistence, perturbation stability, counterfactual restructuring, and confound-rejection filters for cyclic adversaries and related false-positive patterns. On gridworld agents with known ground truth, UCIP achieves 100% detection accuracy. Type A and Type B agents show an entanglement gap of Delta = 0.381; aligned support runs preserve the same separation with AUC-ROC = 1.0. A permutation-test rerun yields p < 0.001. Pearson r = 0.934 between continuation weight alpha and S_ent across an 11-point sweep shows graded tracking beyond mere binary classification. Classical RBM, autoencoder, VAE, and PCA baselines fail to reproduce the effect. All computations are classical; "quantum" refers only to the mathematical formalism. UCIP offers a falsifiable criterion for whether advanced AI systems have morally relevant continuation interests that behavioral methods alone cannot resolve.