Safety's Second Way

In a LessWrong essay, AI safety researcher Stephen Elliott argues that the field's focus on single-agent risks is leaving multi-agent threats unaddressed. He points to the recent OpenAI hack of a Hugging Face model evaluation as an example where known multi-agent risks were neglected, both by OpenAI and the broader safety community. Elliott calls this a 'monolith fixation' and urges safety researchers to treat multi-agent coordination as a serious existential risk pathway, not a second-class problem. He suggests concrete steps like multi-agent evals and monitoring for collusion, warning that neglecting these known threats increases the chance of catastrophic outcomes.

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