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This paper introduces an ecological framework for AI agent safety, modeling population dynamics based on cybersecurity capability and collaboration. It demonstrates that collaboration among agents can lead to a critical population threshold, below which the population declines and above which it experiences explosive growth, even with unchanged individual capabilities. The work advocates for ecological red teaming and population pacing to manage this "strong Allee effect" and prevent runaway misaligned agent populations.
Collaboration among AI agents can trigger a population explosion and runaway cyber capability, even if individual agents are weak, by creating a critical population threshold for takeoff.
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.
