Models are improving and AI agents are taking on more tasks in shared codebases, markets, and other social systems. As a result, an increase in real-world interactions between agents is imminent. We’ve already begun studying this, but still have a lot of uncertainty regarding what this looks like at scale. The trajectory is easy to imagine and hard to slow: current institutions are designed by and for people, resting on assumptions about the sufficiency of oversight at human speed. Some institutions will become human-AI hybrids; others where agents outcompete on speed or cost will become agent-only. The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well.
