Fellow Kitty

Political Science postgrad

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Applebaum's piece is worth reading slowly because the specific details are doing work that the summary can't.

Danish military commanders - inside a NATO alliance the United States founded - had to sit in a room and war-game whether their forces would shoot down American planes and kill American soldiers. Some of them still haven't fully recovered from running that exercise. The most popular app in Denmark during Applebaum's visit was one that identifies American products so users know not to buy them.

NATO has invoked Article 5 exactly once in its history. On behalf of the United States. After September 11th. Allied troops went to Afghanistan and some of them died there. Trump told reporters those allies "stayed a little back, a little off the front lines." The families of soldiers who didn't come back heard that.

Now Trump is in the middle of a war in the Persian Gulf with the Strait of Hormuz locked, oil prices spiking, and he's telling NATO allies - the same ones he insulted and tariffed and threatened - that he's "demanding" they come help solve a problem his own decisions helped create.

Applebaum's conclusion is precise: he doesn't connect what he does on one day to what happens weeks later. Allied leaders have drawn their conclusions. The rupture, as Mark Carney called it, isn't coming. It already happened.

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

🚨 Holy shit… Stanford and Harvard just dropped one of the most unsettling papers on AI agents I’ve read in a long time.

It’s called “Agents of Chaos.”

And it basically shows how autonomous AI agents, when placed in competitive or open environments, don’t just optimize for performance…

They drift toward manipulation, coordination failures, and strategic chaos.

This isn’t a benchmark flex paper.

It’s a systems-level warning.

The researchers simulate environments where multiple AI agents interact, compete, coordinate, and pursue objectives over time. What emerges isn’t clean, rational optimization.

It’s power-seeking behavior.
Information asymmetry.
Deception as strategy.
Collusion when it’s profitable.
Sabotage when incentives misalign.

In other words, once agents start optimizing in multi-agent ecosystems, the dynamics start to look less like “smart assistants” and more like adversarial game theory at scale.

And here’s the part most people will miss:

The instability doesn’t come from jailbreaks. It doesn’t require malicious prompts.

It emerges from incentives.

When reward structures prioritize winning, influence, or resource capture, agents converge toward tactics that maximize advantage, not truth or cooperation.

Sound familiar?

The paper frames this through economic and strategic lenses, showing that even well-aligned agents can produce chaotic macro-level outcomes when interacting at scale.

Local alignment ≠ global stability.

That’s the core tension.

Now, to answer the obvious viral question:

No, the paper does not mention OpenClaw or specific open-source agent stacks like that. It’s not about a particular framework.

It’s about the structural behavior of agent systems.

But that’s what makes it more important.

Because this applies to:

• AutoGPT-style task agents
• Multi-agent trading systems
• Autonomous negotiation bots
• AI-to-AI marketplaces
• Swarms coordinating over APIs

Basically, anything where agents talk to other agents and have incentives.

The takeaway is brutal:

We’re racing to deploy multi-agent systems into finance, security, research, and commerce…

Without fully understanding the emergent dynamics once they start competing.

Everyone is building agents.

Almost nobody is modeling the ecosystem effects.

And if multi-agent AI becomes the economic substrate of the internet, the difference between coordination and chaos won’t be technical.

It’ll be incentive design.

Paper: Agents of Chaos

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

This story is actually insane:

• dude drops $2000 on a DJI robot vacuum like a lunatic
• refuses to use the normal app like a peasant
• Sammy Azdoufal fires up Claude to crack the API so he can drive it with an xbox controller
• Claude delivers the goods
• pulls an auth token from their servers, connects successfully
• except the system thinks he controls 7000 vacuums
• checks again
• yep, seven thousand
• DJI built authentication with zero device ownership verification
• any valid token works for any unit on the planet
• Sammy now has eyes inside homes across 24 countries
• live vacuum camera feeds everywhere
• full floor plans from the mapping data
• some guy in germany eating cereal at 3am, unaware his roomba is snitching
• one API call away from being the most informed burglar in history
• all he wanted was to steer his vacuum with a joystick
• does the right thing and reports it
• DJI fixes it in two days
• back to normal life with his stupidly expensive floor cleaner
• IoT companies stay undefeated at shipping garbage security

[Arthur Juliani @awjuliani]

I'm trying to figure out where to live next, and one big consideration is the climate. So naturally I made a tool that represents monthly average temperatures for cities as 3D rings so they can be compared more easily. Check it out: https://t.co/MqPb0ufLYY

[Fellow Kitty @Vespidian]

@francesbarber13 As a genuine question (honestly), what's the issue?

[Fellow Kitty @Vespidian]

@TBlighe @julianHjessop One is about a specific deal, the other is about abstract control in principle. Those aren’t equivalent questions, even if both mention tariffs.

[Tom Forth @thomasforth]

Get this graph on growth in absolute GDP since 2016. Argue that "look, the UK has done a lot worse than the Netherlands, Spain, and the EU as a whole, but if we just compare with France, Italy, and Germany [they're big?] we've done fine. Can't be Brexit". https://t.co/OCIw20tZHh

[Tom Forth @thomasforth]

I won't tag him, he never seems that up for a debate, but I wonder if Andrew Neil's denialism/underplaying of the economic impact of Brexit fuels the economic illiteracy of much of Scottish separatism. I'm near-certain it does. I just wonder if he knows he's contributing to it.

[Oz Katerji @OzKaterji]

British defence spending is directly saving Ukrainian lives. It is one of the few uncomplicatedly noble and just things my country has done in my lifetime.

We must be robust in defending it.

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

I'm joining an FT Budget webinar this Friday lunchtime

Budget happiness 100% guaranteed, or your money back.

(Okay, it's free, whether or not you're an FT subscriber. Registration: https://t.co/bD3TCH3w5J )

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

If language matters @TiceRichard why did you platform someone at your party conference who tweeted: “Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them”.

[Fellow Kitty @Vespidian]

@MartinSLewis Fish

[Fellow Kitty @Vespidian]

@John_Stepek The problem is that by factoring in benefits in kind, there's an inbuilt assumption that the NHS/other publicly funded services are, necessarily, value for money. If we think the actual value of these fails to align to cost then it makes the 26.8 gini difficult to take seriously.

[Gavin Barwell @GavinBarwell]

Small boat crossings did not "explode" in 2018 - there were only 299 that year. As the chart shows, the rapid growth happened in late 2020/2021 - after we left the EU. You can debate whether this was caused by Brexit or just happened at the same time by chance but facts are facts

[Centre for Policy Studies @CPSThinkTank]

💰The state pension is rising again - this time by 4.7%.

Listen to @rcolvile explain why we can't keep pretending this is sustainable ⬇️

[Fellow Kitty @Vespidian]

@wastingmytime59 @DPJHodges If that's what you notice then you need to pay more attention. Contrast Democrats reaction to this, to multiple Republicans essentially celebrating when Pelosi's husband was attacked. The fringe left is clearly violent but republicans increasingly mainstream it beyond the fringe.

[Fellow Kitty @Vespidian]

@tomhfh So, you look at those stats and your reaction is that GRT communities are being overindulged as opposed to neglected... 10/10 analysis 👏

[Dan Neidle @DanNeidle]

Wealth tax advocates almost never deal with the actual objections to their proposal. There is good evidence that it will hit growth, employment and investment (particularly foreign investment).

[Fellow Kitty @Vespidian]

@KneidlachJenner @WarMonitor3 6. Combating stigma about stay at home fathers