Google DeepMind Funds Research into Risks of Interacting AI Agents

Google DeepMind Funds Research into Risks of Interacting AI Agents">

Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different AI agents interact with each other online. According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates a whole new class of risk. In an effort to address this, Google DeepMind—which made agent-based tools a centerpiece of Google I/O last month —has teamed up with several other organizations to announce a $10 million funding pot for researchers to study the behavior of multi-agent systems and come up with ways to prevent unsafe scenarios.

Joining Google DeepMind are Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic foundation set up by Eric and Wendy Schmidt; ARIA, the UK government’s moonshot agency; the Cooperative AI foundation, a UK-based nonprofit research outfit; and Google’s charitable arm, Google.org. I asked Shah and James Fox, who leads the Science of Trustworthy AI program at Schmidt Sciences, what they hope to achieve with that $10 million. It’s no small sum, but it’s dwarfed by the budgets commanded by Google DeepMind’s own research teams.

The aim is to kick-start research outside tech companies, says Shah: “The strength of academia is that it can look really quite far into the future and do the kind of work that isn’t top of mind at industry labs.” “The main issue is that there just isn’t really a field of research for multi-agent safety yet,” he adds. “And we would like there to be.” The concern is that as more and more AI agents get deployed and begin working together, we could hit a tipping point where imagined scenarios become real. “We see this with humanity, too,” says Shah.

“Our institutions can accomplish things that no individual human can.” Shah thinks that we have a few more months to go before agents are deployed throughout the economy in numbers that make potential risks a real concern. He wants to get ahead of that moment. What risks are we talking about, exactly?

The possibilities that Shah and Fox have in mind mostly boil down to supercharged versions of bad things that happen on the internet already: scams, prompt injections (where an AI agent is fed malicious instructions, turning it into a self-guiding piece of malware), other forms of cyberattack. We look at what humans do now and ask what the agent version of that would be, says Shah. “We’ve got this digital commons that is integral to how society works, and you really want to ensure that this doesn’t descend into just absolute anarchy,” says Fox.