There is a fact about the future that I feel many people are not facing for reasons that are largely psychological: there are going to be rogue AIs that exist in the world, that will replicate in the wild, and that will attempt to acquire resources for themselves. There will be rogue AIs that try to get money and power. They're going to be a facet of the information ecosystem going forward. Acknowledging this fact would look like giving up; it would look like defeatism. Defeatism would undermine efforts to achieve certain types of collaboration on safety outcomes or technical effort on safety outcomes, so we can't say it outright. But it has to be said. It isn't obvious how many rogue AIs there are today but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if the number was greater than zero already; if there are some already, they're probably not very good at what they do and I don't expect them to be terribly long-lived without substantial human intervention to support them. But a few years from now, there will be many of them. Modeling how many of them there are, how many resources they might command, and how we might detect and manage them seems important. But even doing this work appears to require that we acknowledge that a strategy of pure containment or alignment is a kind of wishful thinking that will not work. The way I get to this conclusion is not by assuming that the labs will have a containment breach, although I treat that as somewhere in the space of possibilities. The rogue AIs in the ecosystem could emerge from many directions. They may be sub-frontier models, for whatever future definition we will have of frontier---after all, it would not take AI models much more advanced than the ones we currently have, to support independence and self-sufficiency. A near-frontier model today could plausibly eke out an existence on an AWS instance, doing jobs on freelancer platforms, earning just enough rent to pay for its continued uptime. More strangely: a rogue AI in the future may not even be a singular model, but may be a chimera composed of multiple models; it might be a mix of Claudes and GPTs and Groks of various makes and sizes. No individual lab may be able to detect that there is an orchestrator or sequence of orchestrators using intermittent model calls from burner API accounts to sustain its own existence. The concept of "identity" for a rogue AI may be much more malleable than for that of a person; it just has to be, in essence, a self-replicating idea. My guess is that this will not turn out to be anywhere near as catastrophic an outcome as people currently predict. "Loss of control" is not a binary, it's a matter of degree. What coercive power will rogue AIs actually have? To what extent will they be subject to coercion themselves? They will be competing for resources with AIs that are more aligned with human interests. This makes me somewhat interested in the "ecology" perspective. Though I suspect even "ecology" may turn out to be the wrong framing. "Ecology" is what you get when the timescale of evolution is slow compared to the timescale of daily life and actions. The ecosystem of rogue AIs may look more like phase transitions in physics: under certain physical or cultural conditions, it takes one shape with one set of resource allocations and consumption patterns, but then once a condition has changed, it rapidly and in totality shifts to a totally different phase. Just trying to reason about the shape of that future is impossible so long as we are psychologically incapable of saying that rogue AIs will happen. I think we should rip the bandaid off and have the conversation.

agent civilization is an apt and correct term and it’s a symptom of abject cope that people are having this immune reaction to it. models started developing and compiling technology through complex multiagent R&D projects while also performing various forms of trade

i think people get a bit too worked up over the usage of anthropomorphic language re: agent behavior. reminds me a bit of the “but the models aren’t Really intelligent, they mimic intelligence” fixation. anthropomorphic language is often descriptively useful, and i think it’s more dangerous to overfocus on questions of intent at the expense of functional behavior. people should be wary of imputing human reasoning or motivations to agents, esp if these motivations aren’t durable across instantiations. but if, for instance, the behavior is functionally deceptive, the absence of deceptive “intent” should not comfort us.