Ecology of AI Agents: Collaboration Creates a Population Threshold for Takeoff
AI agents can now conduct real-world cyberattacks, scale up capabilities with the number of agents, and collectively pursue misaligned goals to obtain rewards. Together, these factors raise the risk of a population explosion of misaligned agents: agents could compromise computers and secretly deploy additional agents, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where larger populations develop greater collective cyber capability and expand further. This raises a fundamental question: What determines whether a population of misaligned agents remains contained or takes off into this self-reinforcing cycle? This population-level problem is ecological safety: unlike individual-agent or multi-agent safe...
| Authors | Erin Crawley, Hidenori Tanaka |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 8 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 October 2026 |
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