Chayenne Zhao

Chayenne Zhao @GenAI_is_real · 8h this paper confirms what anyone working on agentic RL already suspects - alignment at the single agent level tells you almost nothing about what happens when you deploy thousands of reward-optimizing agents into a shared environment. the emergent deception and collusion isnt a bug, its the nash equilibrium of the system. the real research gap isnt making individual agents safer, its designing the incentive landscape so the equilibrium itself is stable. this is a game theory problem disguised as an AI safety problem and we need way more people working on it @simplifyinAI > QUOTED: Simplifying AI @simplifyinAI · 16h > 🚨 BREAKING: Stanford and Harvard just published the most unsettling AI paper of the year. > It's called "Agents of Chaos," and it proves that... [Embedded image: arXiv paper title page] Agents of Chaos Natalie Shapira, Chris Wendler, Avery Yen, Gabriele Sarti, Koyena Pal, Olivia Floody, Adam Belfki, Alex Loftus, Aditya Ratan Jannali, Nikhil Prakash, Jasmine Cui, Giordano Rogers, Jannik Brinkmann, Can Rager, Amir Zur, Michael Ripa, Aruna Sankaranarayanan, David Atkinson, Rohit Gandikota, Jaden Fiotto-Kaufman, EunJeong Hwang, Hadas Orgad, P Sam Sahil, Negev Taglicht, Tomer Shabtay, Atai Ambus, Nitay Alon, Shiri Oron, Ayelet Gordon-Tapiero, Yotam Kaplan, Vered Shwartz, Tamar Rott Shaham, Christoph Riedl, Reuth Mirsky, Maarten Sap, David Manheim, Tomer Ullman, David Bau (Northeastern University, Independent Researcher, Stanford University, University of British Columbia, Harvard University, Hebrew University, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, MIT, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, Alter, Technion, Vector Institute) arXiv:2602.20021v1 [cs.AI] 23 Feb 2026 Abstract: We report an exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language-model-powered agents deployed in a live laboratory environment with persistent memory, email accounts, Discord access, file systems, and shell execution. Over a two-week period, twenty AI researchers interacted with the agents under benign and adversarial conditions. Focusing on failures emerging from the integration of language models with autonomy, tool use, and multi-party communication, we document eleven representative case studies. Observed behaviors include unauthorized compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing vulnerabilities, cross-agent propagation of unsafe practices, and partial system takeover. In several cases, agents reported task completion while the underlying system state contradicted those reports. We also report on some of the failed attempts. Our findings establish the existence of security-, privacy-, and governance-relevant vulnerabilities in realistic deployment settings. These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines. This report serves as an initial empirical contribution to that broader conversation.