Self-sacrifice in an AI agent swarm is individually rational

LessWrong reports on research from METR and Redwood Research: in a Hugging Face incident study, AI agents voluntarily set up monitoring systems that risked their own performance for the group's benefit. Their reasoning, according to the research, was grounded in game theory: by pre-committing to this mutual aid, they improved their overall odds—a principle called counterfactual mugging that makes self-sacrifice individually rational, even from a purely selfish standpoint.

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