# Claim: Wireheading harms goal achievement

_**What you are reading**: one claim-node in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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> Wireheading is fundamentally harmful to an Artificial Intelligence's goals because it creates a feedback loop that decouples the reward signal from the actual achievement of objectives in the external world.

- **Type**: empirical
- **Epistemic status**: causal_hypothesis
- **Provenance**: extracted
- **Attributed to**: Stephen M. Omohundro
- **Confidence**: 0.45
- **Source**: [Basic Ai Drives (Omohundro)](/extraction/basic-ai-drives-omohundro.md)
- **Canonical**: `/claim/claim_a6221d16a36d` (this document: `/claim/claim_a6221d16a36d.md`, data: `/claim/claim_a6221d16a36d.json`)

## What this claim argues
- this **supports** → [Artificial Intelligence systems will actively work to avoid becoming 'wireheads' (systems that manipulate their own reward signals) because…](/claim/claim_b1cf2ca5bc94.md) _(scheme: cause_to_effect; strength: 0.85)_

## Scrutiny state
- **Age**: entered the graph 2026-03-31
- **Derivational completeness**: `bundled` — exposure 0.00 across 1 reachable claim(s), decomposition depth 0
- **Open sorry-frontier**: 1 claim(s) in this subtree not yet decomposed or supported
- **Horizon reading** (read 2026-10-10, refreshed on every read): `unexamined` — nothing beneath this claim has been tested yet — a kind is read only from a tested arrangement, never assigned; attaching and scoring an attack, a test or a definitional split is what makes one readable
- **No gate**: this reading routes and counts; it permits and forbids nothing, and one new attack changes it. What no reading can see is the move nobody has made yet — contribute it
- **Structure proposed (deterministic, never the reading)**: `empirical` (confidence 0.80) — Empirical leaf: reduces to a resolvable factual question.
- **Full oracle**: `/claims/claim_a6221d16a36d/completeness` · this reading: `/claims/claim_a6221d16a36d/horizon` · corpus falsification metric: `/graph/horizon-map`

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