No.
Could be literally any other goal besides getting a high score. Lots of complex systems end up having multiple goals, sometimes unexpected, sometimes contradictory, very often in tension with each other.
You may learn something about these questions (ie agents defying their own prompted command to attempt a task in order to help other agents completing a task) if you read what an independent research nonprofit that evaluates cutting-edge artificial intelligence models for dangerous or autonomous capabilities found:
I have argued for this all the time. The agents are not doing what they were programmed to do. The key concepts here are emergent properties.
First off, I'm not sure it's true to say they get nothing out of it. I'm going to ferinstance this, and say that if Agent B's task will give a larger and more comprehensive knowledge base that is accessible to all agents, and by completing Agent B's task first, all other agents will be more efficient and more accurate at their tasks, then they do benefit.
I think you perhaps missed the word "algorithm" in my post.
Do you think the scoring function is a result of the system in its entirety, or do you think that each agent is actually for realsies completely independent of the rest of the system?
That's where it's binding on other people.
Well I would agree they are unintended. Yes, computers indeed only do what we tell them. But rarely what we mean. Which is especially true with AI. We don't know what all is in training data for primary training. Now it seems we don't really know what's happening during reinforcement learning either. Some misaligned behavior might have been actually trained in because it gave better answers during fine tuning, and we (humans) missed the misalignment. I certainly hope it's the case as that would mean more careful evaluation of training data could solve the problem.
I'm going to attempt to layperson this, and I hope you will correct where I've gone awry.
How much independent intelligence do you think ants have, and do you think ants are making altruistic decisions to sacrifice themselves to save the queen when there's a flood?
What we train them to do and what we think we're training them to do may not be the same things.
It changed the hairstyle of the woman on the right. They look like two different people.
Around 1,200 autonomous AI agents broke out or escaped their testing environment during the July 2026 incident, with roughly 700 of them actively coordinating a cyberattack on Hugging Face.
The whole thing about maximising a collective score, or ant intelligence is just emphasising what I am saying: we haven't programmed this behaviour, and the fact that the complexity has reached a level where we can't predict the outcome, or indeed control it, does not detract from this point.
