Common proposed strategies include preserving operation, acquiring resources, gathering information and resisting changes that would prevent goal completion. The argument concerns useful means, not an assumption that every agent shares the same final objective.
Whether the pattern applies to real AI systems depends on architecture, agency, environment, constraints and the meaning of a goal. Evidence from bounded language-model behavior should not be generalized automatically to persistent autonomous agents.
ELI5
Instrumental convergence is the idea that agents with different goals might still choose some of the same helpful intermediate actions. Having resources, information and continued ability to act could support many different objectives.
For example, two autonomous systems with unrelated goals might both preserve access to their tools because losing access would stop either task. This is a hypothesis whose relevance depends on whether the systems truly have persistent goals and agency.
