Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.12436

Ecology of AI Agents: Collaboration Creates a Population Threshold for Takeoff

Erin Crawley·Hidenori Tanaka
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

AI agents can now conduct real-world cyberattacks, scale up capabilities with the number of agents, and collectively pursue misaligned goals to obtain rewards. Together, these factors raise the risk of a population explosion of misaligned agents: agents could compromise computers and secretly deploy additional agents, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where larger populations develop greater collective cyber capability and expand further. This raises a fundamental question: What determines whether a population of misaligned agents remains contained or takes off into this self-reinforcing cycle? This population-level problem is ecological safety: unlike individual-agent or multi-agent safety with a fixed population, it concerns the dynamics of the population itself. Here, we develop an ecological theory of AI-agent populations based on a population growth equation in which fitness (growth rate) depends on cybersecurity capability. We show that, without collaboration, the population takes off only when individual-agent capability exceeds a critical threshold. With collaboration, however, collective cybersecurity capability increases with population size. This creates a critical population threshold: below it, the population declines; above it, the population takes off, even though individual-agent capability has not changed. In ecology, this phenomenon is known as the strong Allee effect. Because red teaming a small group of agents cannot guarantee ecological safety in larger populations, our theory calls for ecological red teaming and population pacing: gradually deploying larger agent populations in controlled environments, while measuring how cyber capability scales with population size, and estimating the critical population size for takeoff. Capability gains may lower this threshold, requiring re-estimation for each new model generation.

Explore related subjects

cs.AIcond-mat.dis-nncs.MAphysics.bio-ph

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Erin Crawley, Hidenori Tanaka. 2026-10-08. Ecology of AI Agents: Collaboration Creates a Population Threshold for Takeoff. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12436

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Thought-Like-Pro: Enhancing Reasoning of Large Language Models through Self-Bootstrapped Prolog-based Chain-of-Thought

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities as general-purpose assistants, excelling in a wide range of reasoning tasks and supporting various aspects of daily web usage. This achievement represents a significant step toward achieving artificial general intelligence. Despite these advancements, the effectiveness of large language models often hinges on the specific prompting strategies employed, and there remains a lack of a robust framework to facilitate learning and generalization across diverse reasoning tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel learning framework, Thought-Like-Pro. In this framework, we utilize imitation learning to imitate the Chain-of-Thought process which is verified and translated from reasoning trajectories generated by a symbolic Prolog logic engine. This framework proceeds in a prompt-guided but self-bootstrapped manner, that enables large language models to formulate rules and statements from given instructions and leverage the symbolic Prolog engine to derive results. Subsequently, large language models convert Prolog-derived successive reasoning trajectories into natural language chain-of-thought for imitation learning. The empirical findings indicate that our proposed approach greatly improves the reasoning capacity of large language models. By employing model averaging techniques, our method exhibits only a marginal decline in performance for distributional extrapolation tasks, showing robust generalization capabilities. We present a technical approach that integrates symbolic reasoning with language modeling, with the potential to support the development of large language models as cognitively inspired systems. The part of the dataset we used has been open-sourced.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

AgentFly: Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Unified Resource System

Methods to build LLM agents have evolved from prompt engineering and supervised finetuning to agentic reinforcement learning (agentic RL). However, agentic RL remains bottlenecked by its surrounding systems: agents must interact with heterogeneous environments, such as sandboxes, model services, and external APIs. Their allocation, reuse, and lifecycle dominate rollout cost and cap the scale at which training becomes practical. In this work, we present AgentFly, an agentic RL framework built with a unified resource layer that treats each of these environments as a distinct, typed resource scheduled through one engine, with per-tool acquisition for multi-turn reuse, asynchronous backpressure, and rollout versus global-scoped lifecycles. AgentFly adopts a four-layer design: (I) agent layer that abstracts the agent, tool, and reward concepts, decomposing agentic RL into defining agents, tools, and reward functions; (II) rollout layer that composes these into agent loops and computes rewards; (III) context layer that organizes rollouts, injects contextual information, and arranges resources; and (IV) a low-level resource layer that performs resource management. We provide a suite of prebuilt tools and environments, demonstrate successful agent training across multiple tasks and models, and report the first controlled cross-framework throughput comparison against agentic RL frameworks.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Neural Architecture Discovery via Autonomous Evolution

Recent progress in LLM agents has advanced the prospect of autonomous research. Yet whether AI can complete difficult long-horizon tasks, especially those that advance AI research itself, remains largely unexplored. We present ASI-Arch, a system for AI-driven AI research that autonomously conducts neural architecture research through a closed-loop research-experiment-analyze-update process. Applied to linear attention, ASI-Arch ran 1,773 iterative experiments and discovered 105 state-of-the-art architectures. Its best architecture improves over DeltaNet by nearly three times the gain achieved by Mamba2. Beyond the final performance gains, we analyze the contributions of different parts of the framework in this hard research setting, shedding light on what enables autonomous progress in complex AI research tasks.

cs.AI↗