Character Training for Risk-Averse Agents

Tl;Dr: * We might be able to reduce harm from misaligned AI if it was sufficiently risk-averse, as it could be paid to cooperate rather than rebel (Thornley & MacAskill 2026). * We think character training might be a good way to do this. * We use a short spec/constitution to character train Gemma and Qwen to be risk averse. * This performs better than baselines out of distribution, and doesn't require labelled data. * In terms of results: * We find that token budget and model family are very influential here. * We also find that writing the constitution declaratively ("I am...") works better than procedurally ("Whenever X, I..."). * We didn't find that increasing the number of examples worked well. * We also find that preference for myopic reward also increased, which is worrying. * We think that character training is a viable and exciting way to improve the alignment of models, and that risk-aversion may be a good target here. But, it’s important to understand character training well, especially since undesirable behaviours can also leak. Introduction Thornley and MacAskill (2026) argue that paying misaligned AIs to cooperate is unaffordable if they are risk-neutral. A sufficiently risk-averse agent, by contrast, has steeply diminishing marginal utility in resources, so a modest reliable payment can win out against a lower chance of a larger prize, which makes a deal more attractive to it. Zhang et al. (2026) showed that SFT, DPO and activation steering can induce constant absolute risk aversion (CARA), with partial generalisation from low to astronomically high stakes. But those methods train on worked answers in the benchmark's own format, which raises the concern that the model is simply pattern matching to the types of scenario-based questions it sees in SFT. This seems like a natural setting for character training (Maiya et al. 2025). In our paper, we: * distil risk-averse constitutions into four open-weight models, * compare the in