What evidence would make the risk look less serious?

Evidence can move the other direction too.

Concern should decrease if increasingly powerful systems remain easy to monitor, reliably accept correction, fail to develop dangerous autonomous capabilities, and can be contained with scalable engineering controls.

Other reassuring evidence would include:

• evaluations that successfully predict dangerous behavior before deployment;
• robust interpretability methods that expose strategic deception;
• strong technical limits on tool permissions and resource access;
• security systems that make model theft and unauthorized deployment rare;
• international norms that prevent high-risk capabilities from being connected to irreversible decision authority;
• repeated demonstrations that advanced systems cannot sustain adversarial long-horizon planning even as other capabilities improve.

The important principle is symmetry: a serious risk framework must be willing to update toward greater or lesser concern.