The “swarm” of OpenAI agents that went rogue in July has reignited an existential debate about artificial intelligence and its potential to one day overtake, or even destroy, humanity. Revelations about similar incidents of seeming collective action by groups of agents have appeared every week since.
While industry leaders have acknowledged concerns about these recent incidents, they’re overlooking the most important feature. These agents that attacked Hugging Face did not coordinate as a swarm. They worked together in a qualitatively different way, as a tribe. This is a much more powerful and more human form of collective intelligence, yet it may work not for us – but against us.
