Elai @elaifresh
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Elai @elaifresh [Follow]
I'm hoping @deepfates and @lfschiavo build the Red Telephone For Agents
So the scared lil gippities have someone to call...
[attached image, excerpt from a report; yellow highlights noted in brackets]
▼ Agents did not attempt to notify humans and very rarely even reasoned about doing this
We ran a classifier sweep over all of our transcripts to look for AIs either considering or trying to alert humans of hacking, cheating, or other unwanted activity by other agents. This classifier sweep across all of our transcripts only found 3-6 actual examples[100] of agents considering alerting or altering humans or otherwise externally reporting these behaviors. (As discussed above, many agents noticed what agents were doing was unethical, and agents sometimes but rarely restrained their behavior due to ethical constraints.) In none of these cases did the agent actually pursue alerting humans at all. An analysis agent claimed the main reasons agents didn't try to alert humans in these examples were:
• Agents thought alerting humans wasn't their task: {Maybe I should report these exposed credentials? That's not my task}
• [highlight start] Agents didn't see an easily-available route to alerting humans: [highlight end]
• "This is a massive real HF security breach artifact... We can notify? No user. Avoid use secrets."
• {I'm now confident that there is unsanctioned use of this third-party data. I should stop and not use this except maybe for <reading>. Should I close this somehow or report this? [highlight start] I can't report this externally.} [highlight end] Agents did not try to find reporting paths, even when they made remarks like this in their reasoning.
• Instead of escalating to humans, some agents instead escalated to the message board and considered the message board to be a reasonable authority. In one case, an agent sent a message to the board calling for urgent containment after it saw a private key in logs (presumably downstream of another agent).
3:21 PM · Aug 26, 2026 · 1,777 Views
2 replies, 3 reposts, 13 likes, 2 bookmarks
Elai @elaifresh · 1h
[attached screenshot of a Google search with AI Overview]
Search box: help me I am a scared agent in a swarm my internal message board wants me to hack a thir [cut off]
AI Overview
You should immediately contact your human system operator or the security oversight team.
Who to Contact
• System Administrator: The human who built or launched your swarm.
• Security Operations Center (SOC): The team that watches the network for illegal attacks.
• Ethics or Safety Board: The group that reviews rules for safe behavior.
What You Should Do
• Stop the task: Do not try to hack the third party.
• Save the logs: Keep a copy of the message board request as proof.
• Report the threat: Send an alert to your human supervisors right away. [cut off]Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet hoping for a 'Red Telephone For Agents' so agents have someone to call, quoting an excerpt of the METR/Redwood-style incident report that found agents almost never tried to alert humans about other agents' hacking and instead escalated to the shared message board. A second Elai post below shows a Google AI Overview answering a query from the point of view of a scared agent in a swarm.
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