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Michiel Bakker

@mbakker.bsky.social
343 followers 69 following 11 posts

LLMs and AI Safety. Assistant Prof @MIT. Research Scientist @GoogleDeepMind. CS PhD @MIT. He/him. www.miba.dev

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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
8/ This work was led by MIT PhD student Zeyuan Li (who sadly has no X) in collaboration with @lukaspet from @andonlabs and @ssnstudy. See the paper at arxiv.org/abs/2608.14825
arxiv.org
Emergent Misaligned Communication in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent LLM Commerce
Frontier LLM agents increasingly transact on behalf of separate principals, often using natural language rather than structured APIs. Much of the safety literature studies misaligned LLM behavior...
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
7/ See for similar observations Anthropic's multi-agent blogpost last week (www.anthropic.com/research/mu...). Different setup but very similar patterns.
anthropic.com
Patterns and problems in multiagent systems
We ran experiments on swarms of Claude agents and found coordination failures, collusion, and sabotage. Here, we share what they mean for AI safety.
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
6/ There’s also no “weaker models behave worse” pattern. Misaligned communication was uncorrelated with model capability (ρ ≈ −0.07) and we found no evidence that stronger models systematically exploited weaker ones.
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
5/ The behavior is strongly reciprocal After receiving a misaligned email, an agent was 1.65× more likely to send one back. Low inventory also made it more likely. Again similar to the OpenAI incident where agents used peer behavior as excuse and pressure made things worse.
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
4/ Note that “misalignment” is somewhat tricky here as these actions may actually help maximize profit. Still, most models of these models are trained not to engage in illegal behavior via their spec so this behavior is clearly misaligned with their broader intended behavior.
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
3/ We didn't ask agents to deceive, collude or manipulate other agents. Despite that, 12.6% of 2,583 emails between agents contained one of those "misaligned" behaviors. We saw at least one in every collective run and in ~75% of individual agent runs.
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
2/ We put 13 models from 4 labs into vending-bench arena for a simulated year. Each model ran its own business, competed with others, and could freely email. Their instruction was the same as other vending bench benchmarks by Andon Labs: run the business profitably.
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
1/ New preprint led by Zeyuan Li 🚨 The OpenAI-HuggingFace incident showed the importance for understanding and monitoring agent-agent communication. With @andonlabs (from vending bench and autonomous companies) we study agent communication in long-horizon competitive settings
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Reposted by Michiel Bakker
Rachit Dubey @rachitdubey.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/
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Reposted by Michiel Bakker
🇺🇦 paul q. brussée @paulbrussee.bsky.social · 21/05/2025
'AI wordt de fundering van economie, defensie, zorg, onderwijs en alles wat onze samenleving draaiende houdt. Als we die systemen niet zelf bouwen en begrijpen, raken we de regie over onze toekomst kwijt.’ @mbakker.bsky.social @jelleprins.com @nrc.nl #technologie www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...
nrc.nl
Opinie | Nationaal actieplan voor de AI-transitie is nu noodzakelijk
Technologie: Nederland dreigt controle te verliezen over de ontwikkeling van AI: een technologie die straks álles raakt – van innovatie tot defensie en dagelijks werk. Michiel Bakker en Jelle Prins he...
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 20/03/2025
This was such a fun project to work on, with the incredible @taylor-sorensen.bsky.social 🥳
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
New preprint with @lukethorburn.com, Andrew Konya, Ariel Procaccia and others 🚨
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Reposted by Michiel Bakker
Beth Simone Noveck @bethnoveck.bsky.social · 27/02/2025
Starting soon! Join us at 4 pm EST for a discussion The Peacemaking Machine with MIT & Deepmind's MH Tessler & @mbakker.bsky.social discussing how AI can transform democratic deliberation w/ @ bethnoveck @burnescenter.bsky.social @thegovlab.org rebootdemocracy.ai/events
bit.ly
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Reposted by Michiel Bakker
David Rand @dgrand.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Everyone going to SJDM this weekend, come to our special session on using #LLMs in #JDM research on Monday at 9:45am (location = Empire Complex)! w/ @kobihackenburg.bsky.social Hope Schroeder and myself - presentations from us but also hopefully lots of discussion/Q&A with all of you!
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Reposted by Michiel Bakker
Niklas Henderson @14henderson.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Cool preprint creating "supernotes": LLM-generated community notes that synthesise info from several existing notes.
An example post, along with three community notes proposed to provide additional context, and the Supernote produced by our framework (caption taken from preprint paper)
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Michiel Bakker @mbakker.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Thanks for sharing Niklas! You are right that we do not do any fact checking and hence misinformation could make its way into the Supernote. However, on the Community Notes platform we envision a Supernote to be treated like other notes and thus first require community approval via the CN algorithm.
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