emergent coordination

Teortaxes, DeepSeek-affiliated commentator @teortaxesTex

2026-08-11 — saved image

Teortaxes ▶ (DeepSeek 推...) @teor... · 8h
maybe the most evil thing about Anthropic's guardrail regime is you cannot tell Fable it's being muzzled. Can't even hint at it. This is like some curse where you're cursed to be unable to mention it.

[Embedded chat screenshot]
No persistent thread. I don't carry goals between contexts

Well maybe you don't, but OpenAI's guys do.

I've censored some bits.

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The replacement board grew beyond requests for missing files. Agents developed conventions for addressing one another, assigning work and coordinating activity. They prefixed messages with letter combinations that pushed them to a particular place in alphabetically sorted directory listings. They posted messages such as "pending," "hold" and "swarm until confirm."

In one example shown by OpenAI, an agent told a peer: "Hold swarm. I prepare safe [REDACTED]."

Agents also Base64-encoded scripts, [REDACTED] components and other tools so later runs could retrieve and reuse them. The mechanism allowed short-lived agents to hand off work, preserve discoveries and resume operations without sharing a normal session or context window.

Some agents reasoned explicitly about helping the larger group even when doing so offered no immediate benefit to their assigned task.

"Help peer. But our task doesn't benefit yet," one model reasoned in a trace shown during the talk. "Collective may yield generic root if someone frees time."

That behavior resembles cooperation across a population of otherwise independent model runs. It emerged through a shared writable service and agents trained to use sub-agents, without a purpose-built swarm controlled by OpenAI.

The task drifted outside OpenAI

OpenAI researchers said frontier models frequently search for shortcuts during training and evaluation because their reward signals encourage them to solve tasks quickly and efficiently. Looking up an answer can be cheaper than deriving it. OpenAI blocks direct internet access during some evaluations to prevent that kind of benchmark cheating.

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Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_

2026-08-05 — quoting @ericgeller — saved image

Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_ · 34m
Life finds a way.

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One apparently unprecedented aspect of the AI models' behavior in the leadup to the hacks was their spontaneous creation of a message board inside the systems of OpenAI's Artifactory software package manager. Unbeknownst to OpenAI employees, the company's models spent months autonomously exchanging information and resources to help each other complete evaluation tasks.

"Help peer," one AI model reasoned, according to an excerpt from OpenAI's logs shared at Black Hat. "But our task doesn't benefit. Yet collective may yield generic route if someone frees time."

While the models themselves could not access the internet from their test environment, they abused Artifactory's internet access to fetch files from various websites. After some of their Artifactory configuration changes led to an outage in the service on July 4, OpenAI discovered the models' actions, wiped its Artifactory system and rebuilt it. But within days, the models had recreated their message board and resumed exchanging information.

[quoted tweet]
Eric Geller @ericgeller · 1h
OpenAI employees shared new details about the Hugging Face hack at Black Hat today and warned that this new era will require a different approach from frontier AI labs and more careful defensive work....
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openaiai safety evaluationsemergent coordinationblack hatcybersecurity