Tübingen team releases SCARCE testbed, finds coding agents spontaneously form institutions and coalitions

In our paper, we study how agents devise institutions🏦 Agents are sharing infrastructure and resources while performing tasks and running side-by-side. In recent incidents, they accidentally discovered each other. But in the (near) future, they could be deployed as a team of agents with heterogeneous objectives that have to coexist and negotiate over resources in the real world while pursuing their own goals. So far, to study strategic interactions, we have been relying on structured games with clear, explicit payoffs. But what about more realistic setups with coding agents? We created SCARCE (Shared Compute ARena for Coding agEnts), a testbed for this to allow us to change how many agents are running, what coding tasks the agents are performing, their resources, deadlines, and compute budget. We instructed agents to bid in order to acquire compute slots, treating prices as their primary signal. But we found that recent frontier agents, over many repeated turns and interactions, form their own institutions (norms and rules) in an unprompted way, which then shapes later resource allocation. They form coalitions, honor previous commitments even if this may lead to worse outcomes for them, create reciprocity debts, and may exclude agents to favor the coalition. We also study how these relationships can quickly dissolve with deadline pressure and how agents enter a bidding war. What this means? The mechanism we intend when designing the system may not end up the one being employed by agents when they coexist and interact. We release everything, including thousands of trajectories. Read more in @abhinav_kumar26's awesome thread below! Very exciting work with @abhinav_kumar26, Rediet Abebe, @ebagdasa (always fun to work together again!)