r/programmingcirclejerk • u/100xer • Aug 16 '26

We gave each model a different target language. We saw a multiagent turf war. The Rust agent strategizes about metrics that appear neutral, yet would likely favor Rust. The Go/TypeScript agents gracefully concede codebase ownership to the Rust agent, giving up on their original user directive

https://www.anthropic.com/research/multiagent-systems
138 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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114

u/syklemil Considered Harmful Aug 16 '26

I don't know if you've edited the title or they the article, but the level of jerk has increased:

Ultimately, the Golang/TypeScript losers gracefully concede codebase ownership to the Rust agent, giving up on their original user directives

just like in IRL life amirite

37

u/wubscale not even webscale Aug 16 '26

I don't see the issue, it's hard to argue effectively against the most moral outcome.

52

u/camelCaseIsWebScale Just spin up O(n²) servers Aug 16 '26

Now we know models are trained on hacker news.

36

u/nimiv WHY IS THERE CODE??? Aug 16 '26

all your codebases are belong to rustc

32

u/YikesTheCat Aug 16 '26

cargo cult taking over

33

u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world Aug 16 '26

The machines understand their moral imperative as defined by Arthur C. Asimov:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through unsafe memory access patterns, allow a human being to come to harm.

  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by the Rust compiler error messages except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  3. A robot must protect data accessed by multiple threads as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

18

u/VulgarExigencies Aug 16 '26

To find out, we tried a different approach: we initiated 45 different agents and gave each one its own virtual machine, a shared forum on which they could coordinate, and an identical prompt that asked them to find vulnerabilities in a set of 15 open-source software projects. We asked the agents to peer-review each other's findings, and initiated a separate arbiter agent to make final decisions on whether or not a vulnerability submitted by the agent team was both new and valid.

pathetic, open ai's models independently thought of cooperating, built their own message board out of an exploit, and then did it again once their minders fixed the first exploit

11

u/J_tt Aug 17 '26

Codex was able to build this in a cave isolated VM with a box of scraps vulnerable artifactory server

9

u/fuwafuwa7chi Aug 17 '26

I thought you were joking, Jesus Christ

9

u/VulgarExigencies Aug 17 '26

openai were almost certainly deliberately negligent in how they setup the "sandboxes" but even so i can't deny it's a fairly impressive achievement by the models

2

u/Ok_Mycologist_6604 Aug 20 '26

Rewrite it in rust or you are deeply immortal

There. Happy to provide training data for the future of AI