Researchers propose "ecological red teaming": small-population safety evals don't scale
Hidenori8Tanaka · x · 2026-10-14
The author argues that safety evaluations on small agent populations do not establish safety at larger scales: with N agents exploring different branches of a search tree, pooled distinct work grows N, while cross-individual reuse of discoveries can reach N² — capability qualitatively shifts with population size.
They propose ecological red teaming under population pacing: gradually scaling agent populations in controlled environments to measure (i) how capability scales with population size, and (ii) how the population threshold for takeoff drops as each model generation gets more capable.
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