BackUndesirable Dispositions from Competition

Undesirable Dispositions from Competition

Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI

Hammond et al. (2025)

Sub-category

Risk Domain

7AI System Safety, Failures & Limitations

Risks from multi-agent interactions, due to incentives (which can lead to conflict or collusion) and/or the structure of multi-agent systems, which can create cascading failures, selection pressures, new security vulnerabilities, and a lack of shared information and trust.

"Undesirable Dispositions from Competition. It is plausible that evolution selected for certain conflict-prone dispostions in humans, such as vengefulness, aggression, risk-seeking, selfishness, dishon- esty, deception, and spitefulness towards out-groups (Grafen, 1990; Han, 2022; Konrad & Morath, 2012; McNally & Jackson, 2013; Nowak, 2006; Rusch, 2014). Such traits could also be selected for in ML systems that are trained in more competitive multi-agent settings. For example, this might happen if systems are selected based on their performance relative to other agents (and so one agent’s loss becomes another’s gain), or because their objectives are fundamentally opposed (such as when multiple agents are tasked with gaining or controlling a limited resource) (DiGiovanni et al., 2022; Ely & Szentes, 2023; Hendrycks, 2023; Possajennikov, 2000).33"(p. 28)

Entity: Who or what caused the harm

Human

Due to a decision or action made by humans

AI system

Due to a decision or action made by an AI system

Other

Due to some other reason or is ambiguous

Intent: Whether the harm was intentional or accidental

Intentional

Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal

Unintentional

Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal