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

Erin Crawley, Hidenori Tanaka

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…