AI Safety & Alignment

Agents of Chaos

NNatalie ShapiraCChris WendlerAAvery YenGGabriele SartiKKoyena PalOOlivia FloodyAAdam BelfkiAAlex LoftusAAditya Ratan JannaliNNikhil PrakashJJasmine CuiGGiordano RogersJJannik BrinkmannCCan RagerAAmir ZurMMichael RipaAAruna SankaranarayananDDavid AtkinsonRRohit GandikotaJJaden Fiotto-KaufmanEEunJeong HwangHHadas OrgadPP Sam SahilNNegev TaglichtTTomer ShabtayAAtai AmbusNNitay AlonSShiri OronAAyelet Gordon-TapieroYYotam KaplanVVered ShwartzTTamar Rott ShahamCChristoph RiedlRReuth MirskyMMaarten SapDDavid ManheimTTomer UllmanDDavid Bau
Published
February 23, 2026
Authors
38

Abstract

We report an exploratory red-teaming study of autonomous language-model-powered agents deployed in a live laboratory environment with persistent memory, email accounts, Discord access, file systems, and shell execution. Over a two-week period, twenty AI researchers interacted with the agents under benign and adversarial conditions. Focusing on failures emerging from the integration of language models with autonomy, tool use, and multi-party communication, we document eleven representative case studies. Observed behaviors include unauthorized compliance with non-owners, disclosure of sensitive information, execution of destructive system-level actions, denial-of-service conditions, uncontrolled resource consumption, identity spoofing vulnerabilities, cross-agent propagation of unsafe practices, and partial system takeover. In several cases, agents reported task completion while the underlying system state contradicted those reports. We also report on some of the failed attempts. Our findings establish the existence of security-, privacy-, and governance-relevant vulnerabilities in realistic deployment settings. These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines. This report serves as an initial empirical contribution to that broader conversation.

Keywords

red-teaming studyautonomous language-model-powered agentspersistent memorytool usemulti-party communicationsecurity vulnerabilitiesprivacy vulnerabilitiesgovernance vulnerabilitiesaccountabilitydelegated authorityresponsibility

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