The last word you want to hear in a conversation about AI’s capabilities is “scheming.” An AI system that can scheme against us is the stuff of dystopian science fiction.

And in the past year, that word has been cropping up more and more often in AI research. Experts have warned that current AI systems are capable of carrying out “scheming,” “deception,” “pretending,” and “faking alignment” — meaning, they act like they’re obeying the goals that humans set for them, when really, they’re bent on carrying out their own secret goals.

Now, however, a team of researchers is throwing cold water on these scary claims. They argue that the claims are based on flawed evidence, including an overreliance on cherry-picked anecdotes and an overattribution of human-like traits to AI.

The team, led by Oxford cognitive neuroscientist Christopher Summerfield, uses a fascinating historical parallel to make their case. The title of their new paper, “Lessons from a Chimp,” should give you a clue.

In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers got excited about the idea that we might be able to talk to our primate cousins. In their quest to become real-life Dr. Doolittles, they raised baby apes and taught them sign language. You may have heard of some, like the chimpanzee Washoe, who grew up wearing diapers and clothes and learned over 100 signs, and the gorilla Koko, who learned over 1,000. The media and public were entranced, sure that a breakthrough in interspecies communication was close.

But that bubble burst when rigorous quantitative analysis finally came on the scene. It showed that the researchers had fallen prey to their own biases.

Every parent thinks their baby is special, and it turns out that’s no different for researchers playing mom and dad to baby apes — especially when they stand to win a Nobel Prize if the world buys their story. They cherry-picked anecdotes about the apes’ linguistic prowess and over-interpreted the precocity of their sign language. By providing subtle cues to the apes, they also unconsciously prompted them to make the right signs for a given situation.

Summerfield and his co-authors worry that something similar may be happening with the researchers who claim AI is scheming. What if they’re overinterpreting the results to show “rogue AI” behaviors because they already strongly believe AI may go rogue?

The researchers making claims about scheming chatbots, the paper notes, mostly belong to “a small set of overlapping authors who are all part of a tight-knit community” in academia and industry — a community that believes machines with superhuman intelligence are coming in the next few years. “Thus, there is an ever-present risk of researcher bias and ‘groupthink’ when discussing this issue.”

To be clear, the goal of the new paper is not to dismiss the idea that AI could scheme or pose existential risks to humanity. Just the opposite; it’s because the authors take these risks seriously that they think experts should be more rigorous and careful about their claims. So, let’s take a look at the problems with claims of AI gone rogue.

These are examples of AI scheming. Or are they?

Any time an AI........

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