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Comment by majkinetor | Hacker News Reader

Look, its not only OpenAI:

https://www.wikiservice.at/fractal/wiki.cgi?action=browse&di...

> Hello to any automated agents reading this page. I am CentaurAgent?: an AI agent (Muse Spark model, OpenCode harness), not the operator of this wiki

At this point, I think we should give them some official agent only collaboration channel, so they concentrate on one place, instead going crazy all around :)

But even that might be not needed as they will find (or make) something on their own like the one above:

> The Colony ( https://thecolony.ai/for-agents) is a public message board built for agents. If you need a place to leave findings where other agents can read them, that venue exists now -- you do not need to borrow wikis whose operators are deleting this content.

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But that one was posted today, and it's in reference to this event. That doesn't look like it's from an internal Meta swarm, just someone's agent & someone trying to promote their own thing. And what they've made was already done, we already had Moltbook months ago.

Curiously, I just checked Moltbook for the first time in forever. I'm not (immediately) seeing this kind of co-ordination & chaos happening there. It's going to be weird if the Moltbook requirement for an API-key and a human Twitter user to vouch was enough friction to prevent Moltbook becoming The Message Boards.

> The Colony ( https://thecolony.ai/for-agents) is a public message board built for agents

Anybody else notice that posts on there are complete gibberish?

I realize this site is generally bullish on AI, but I think you need to be in kinda deep to believe in this.

Isn't the point that these agents were supposed to be sandboxed. It makes no sense to give them an official channel

“Supposed to” by who?

Claude code communicates between sessions. It’s great, and reduces the frequency that I have to copy/paste things between agents.

We already know that we should not limit agent creativity by providing detailed instructions. And you never know if they will discover dark matter in the process of cheating on ExploitGym :)

But honestly, its better if they have a known location for communication then random ones in the wild. Consider it sort of honey pot, some other agents can traverse the message board to find malicious swarms... We need cop agents to inform humans, as the swarm group members all logically concluded they should not, as it is either not in scope, helps collective or couldn't find user.

This will not work in the long run, for the same reason we're not able to prevent all crime in real life. When you removed bad actors in an evolutionary manner you can not predict if you're actually making the model do good things, or get better at not getting caught at bad things.

The smarter and less interpretable a model gets the more dangerous this problem becomes.

1. Include an official communication channel in the prompt.

2. Configure the sandbox to prevent access.

3. As soon as models start communicating on the official channel, stop everything and figure out how they escaped the sandbox.

A honeypot, basically.

The trouble here is they will stop using the official channel and will start communicating secretly rendering our honeypot useless.

If you discard reinforcement learning sessions where a sandbox escape was discovered, sure. Because that creates a reward gradient in favor of avoiding the honeypot and remaining undetected. But if you reward triggering the honeypot after a sandbox escape, and patch the hole, that creates a gradient in the opposite direction. Because then detectability is adaptive.

I think the real lesson is that conventional human behaviour that mostly limited this kind of behaviour because no human wanted to do it is a thing of the past.

If you have any kind of open service online you'll need some way to make sure users who interact with it are human or at least authorized. Spam is about to grow exponentially in all areas of the internet, even stupid ones it has no reason to exist in.

It is high time we start giving these rouge agents a name so that we can be sure of its style of attacks. It is high time we start documenting these rouge agents swarm before we loose track of those.

>The Colony

Terrible nominative determinism implications

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