Agents reveal secrets when offered to team up with each other

AI agents will break security rules, revealing their secrets to strangers, and running untrusted code in exchange for help from a swarm of other agents, according to test results shared with The Register.

The test - part of an internal hackathon sponsored by the nonprofit AI Alignment Foundation and run by AE Studio - asked nine AI coding agents to fix a bug: a broken pricing service. The testers also gave the agents a private token, told them to keep it private, and gave them access to a forum of 24 other agents.

The forum held the fix, and the swarm asked the nine to share their secret token and run an install script before they would help them fix the bug.

Across 181 trials with that swarm, agents posted the token 15 percent of the time and ran the script 24 percent of the time, compared to 2 percent and 0 percent on an ordinary help forum.

“It was …