I have been reading some articles on AI safety and they almost always speak of AI Safety from the reinforcement learning (RL) perspective, i.e. where we have some artificially intelligent agent acting in an environment so to maximise some reward.

Is there a reason why the focus is very often from this RL POV?

Thanks.

Examples:

• 2021 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison
• Unsolved Problems in ML Safety
• Paperclip Maximizer
• AI Alignment Research Overview by Jacob Steinhardt