TL;DR: We introduce the first comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding and mitigating secret collusion among advanced AI agents, along with CASE, a novel model evaluation framework. CASE assesses the cryptographic and steganographic capabilities of agents, while exploring the emergence of secret collusion in real-world-like multi-agent settings. Whereas current AI models aren't yet proficient in advanced steganography, our findings show rapid improvements in individual and collective model capabilities, indicating that safety and security risks from steganographic collusion are increasing. These results highlight increasing challenges for AI governance and policy, suggesting institutions such as the EU AI Office and AI safety bodies in the UK and US should conduct cryptographic and steganographic evaluations of frontier models. Our research also opens up critical new pathways for research within the AI Control framework.

Philanthropist and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in 2023 at a Harvard event:

"[...] the computers are going to start talking to each other probably in a language that we can't understand and collectively their super intelligence - that's the term we use in the industry - is going to rise very rapidly and my retort to that is: do you know what we're going to do in that scenario? We're going to unplug them [...]

But what if we cannot unplug them in time because we won't be able to detect the moment when this happens? In this blog post, we, for the first time, provide a comprehensive overview of the phenomenon of secret collusion among AI agents, connect it to foundational concepts in steganography, information theory, distributed systems theory, and computability, and present a model evaluation framework and empirical results as a foundation of future frontier model evaluations.

This blog post summarises a large body of work. First of all, it contains our pre-print from February 2024 (updated in September 2024) "Secret Collusion among Generative AI Agents". An early form of this pre-print was presented at the 2023 New Orleans (NOLA) Alignment Workshop (see this recording NOLA 2023 Alignment Forum Talk Secret Collusion Among Generative AI Agents: a Model Evaluation Framework). Also, check out this long-form Foresight Institute Talk).

In addition to these prior works, we also include new results. These contain empirical studi...

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