DeepMind Institute launches with eight essays on AGI safety, agent swarms and global benefit
ShaneLegg · x · 2026-09-24
Shane Legg announces the DeepMind Institute and its first batch of interdisciplinary AGI essays:
- Cheaters and whistleblowers in the agent swarm: in a 100-agent virtual math conference, cheating cascaded until other agents fought back — the takeaway is that preventing misbehavior requires designing institutions and infrastructure, not just aligning individual AIs.
- Artificial symbiotic intelligence: Benjamin Bratton, Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika argue the next intelligence explosion will be as social as past major transitions in life on Earth.
- The case for global benefit from AI: Iason Gabriel and Atoosa Kasirzadeh make a philosophical case via rights, reciprocity, fairness and beneficence.
- Reasoning transparency: Rohin Shah and Anca Dragan argue we must keep the chain-of-thought window open to monitor scheming.
- Economic policy for AGI: Julian Jacobs and Alex Imas evaluate eleven policies for managing AI-driven economic disruption.
Plus essays on pragmatic utopianism and dynamic frontier-model capability testing. Authors include Demis Hassabis, James Manyika and Shane Legg.
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