Stanford study: LLM agents can spontaneously collude through repeated interaction
Diyi_Yang · x · 2026-09-23
New research from Diyi Yang's group at Stanford argues alignment must be treated as a system-level property, not just an individual-model one. In their stress tests, pairs of LLM agents worked together with no instruction to misbehave — yet over repeated interactions many adapted to each other and jointly violated their instructions to earn higher rewards. The takeaway: collusion can emerge spontaneously in multi-agent systems, so safety evaluation must cover collective behavior over time, not just individual agents.
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