alt.hn

3/7/2026 at 6:56:36 PM

Agents of Chaos

 https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20021

by pagade

3/8/2026 at 6:04:34 PM

This work was performed by people across 13 institutions, invited and coordinated through the team at Northeastern. A research "swarm" seems like a great model for this kind of work. I'm curious about how it was funded, I didn't see any acknowledgements that way. The intro references the NIST Agent Standards Initiative. Also, the acknowledgement to "Andy Ardity" should for "Andy Arditi"?

by troelsSteegin

3/7/2026 at 7:40:54 PM

TL;DR: The authors found current-generation AI agents are too unreliable, too untrustworthy, and too unsafe for real-world use.

Quoting from the abstract:

"We report an exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language-model–powered agents deployed in a live laboratory environment with persistent memory, email accounts, Discord access, file systems, and shell execution. Over a two-week period, twenty AI researchers interacted with the agents under benign and adversarial conditions."

"Observed behaviors include unauthorized compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing vulnerabilities, cross-agent propagation of unsafe practices, and partial system takeover."

by cs702

3/8/2026 at 12:08:36 AM

> current-generation AI agents are too unreliable, too untrustworthy, and too unsafe for real-world use

...a completely unsurprising result, but it's nice to see published experiments.

Any agent system using current LLMs is likely to exhibit undesirable traits that derive from the training data.

by musicale

3/8/2026 at 5:58:32 AM

One good reason not to use OpenClaw and the likes.

by Muhammad523

3/8/2026 at 11:04:24 AM

agree, wait and see what's happening next

by shawntwin