Foundationality May Cause Correlated Failures
Risks from multi-agent interactions, due to incentives (which can lead to conflict or collusion) and/or the structure of multi-agent systems, which can create cascading failures, selection pressures, new security vulnerabilities, and a lack of shared information and trust.
"Another important characteristic of LLM development is foundationality — due to the expense of large- scale pretraining, many deployed instances share similar or identical learned components. Foundation- ality may both be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it may be possible to exploit the similarity in the design of LLM-agents to facilitate cooperation (Critch et al., 2022; Conitzer and Oesterheld, 2023; Oesterheld et al., 2023). On the other hand, foundationality may leave LLM-agents vulnerable to correlated failures both in terms of safety and capabilities due to increased output homogenization (Bommasani et al., 2022)."(p. 38)
Part of Vulnerability to Poisoning and Backdoors
Other risks from Anwar et al. (2024) (26)
Agentic LLMs Pose Novel Risks
7.2 AI possessing dangerous capabilitiesMulti-Agent Safety Is Not Assured by Single-Agent Safety
7.6 Multi-agent risksDual-Use Capabilities Enable Malicious Use and Misuse of LLMs
4.0 Malicious Actors & MisuseCorporate power may impeded effective governance
6.1 Power centralization and unfair distribution of benefitsJailbreaks and Prompt Injections Threaten Security of LLMs
2.2 AI system security vulnerabilities and attacksVulnerability to Poisoning and Backdoors
2.2 AI system security vulnerabilities and attacks