Detecting Intrinsic and Instrumental Self-Preservation in Autonomous Agents: The Unified Continuation-Interest Protocol

ArXi:2603.11382v1 Announce Type: new Autonomous agents, especially delegated systems with memory, persistent context, and multi-step planning, pose a measurement problem not present in stateless models: an agent that preserves continued operation as a terminal objective and one that does so merely instrumentally can produce observationally similar trajectories. External behavioral monitoring cannot reliably distinguish between them.