MIRI tried and failed to find a coherent formula for an agent that would let itself be shut down without actively trying to get shut down.

Judged as of 2022-06-10. True: MIRI's published work shows that it researched the problem of an agent that would allow itself to be shut down without being incentivized to seek shutdown (corrigibility and the shutdown problem, for example Soares, Fallenstein, Yudkowsky and Armstrong, 'Corrigibility', 2015), and that it reported no satisfactory, coherent solution as of the claim date. Mostly true: MIRI did work on it and reported the problem as unsolved, but with a minor difference in detail, for example the work was partly done by collaborators or framed as utility indifference. Mixed: MIRI worked on related problems, but it is unclear whether it attempted this specific formulation. Mostly false: MIRI did only marginal work on this problem, or published a proposed solution it regarded as adequate. False: MIRI never worked on the shutdown problem, or had published a solution it endorsed as coherent.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Corrigibility - Machine Intelligence Research Institute Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Soares, Fallenstein, Yudkowsky, Armstrong; AAAI Workshops 2015) · January 2015 Own record

   “In short, a corrigible solution to the shutdown problem does not yet exist, and there is some question about exactly which behaviors should be incentivized.”

2. E2 Corrigibility - Machine Intelligence Research Institute Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Soares, Fallenstein, Yudkowsky, Armstrong; AAAI Workshops 2015) · January 2015 Own record

   “While some proposals are interesting, none have yet been demonstrated to satisfy all of our intuitive desiderata, leaving this simple problem in corrigibility wide-open.”

3. E3 2015 in review - Machine Intelligence Research Institute Machine Intelligence Research Institute · 29 July 2016 Own record

   “Corrigibility was a mid-level priority for us in 2015, and we spent some effort trying to build better models of corrigible agents. In spite of this, we didn’t achieve any big breakthroughs.”

4. E4 Disentangling Corrigibility: 2015-2021 — AI Alignment Forum AI Alignment Forum (post by Koen Holtman) · 16 February 2021

   “Agent designs that provably meet more of them have since been developed, for example here.”

MIRI's 2015 'Corrigibility' paper, co-authored by Yudkowsky, addresses the shutdown problem [E1]. It says that "a corrigible solution to the shutdown problem does not yet exist" (E1) and that no proposal met all the desiderata, "leaving this simple problem in corrigibility wide-open" (E2). MIRI's 2015 review says it put effort into models of corrigible agents but "didn't achieve any big breakthroughs" (E3). E4 says designs meeting more of the desiderata were later developed, which does not show that MIRI found or endorsed a coherent solution, so the record meets the criteria for true.