I think a cleaner way of stating condition 3 might be “there exists some policy with a non-zero chance of deception at some point in the future, with expected value for the mesa-optimizer higher than the policy of always cooperating”.
This could be met if the threat of modification never goes away, but maybe decreases over time. (at training time, system is monitored for defection every episode, at a deployment time it is monitored for defection 1/million episodes, not worthwhile to defect during training but worthwhile to defect at deployment time)
This could fail to be met if the mesa-optimizer believes that 1) there is a 1% chance that it will be detected by the base optimizer 2) if this happens, the base optimizer will be able to determine $O_mesa$ and give it a large negative reward, 100x more than the possible reward from the best defecting policy. (not sure if there’s any version of this that would work, since it seems hard to figure out $O_mesa$ and provide negative reward)
I’d say that the claim is not sufficient—it might provide some alignment value, but it needs a larger story about how the whole computation is going to be safe. I do think that the HCH framework could make specifying an aligned GOFAI-like computation easier (but it’s hard to come up with a rigorous argument for this without pointing to some kind of specification that we can make claims about, which is something I’d want to produce along the way while proceeding with HCH-like approaches)