MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 63.07.05

Distributional Shift

Category: Destabilising Dynamics

Open the MIT Risk Navigator All entries from Hammond2025

Description

"Distributional Shift. Individual ML systems can perform poorly in contexts different from those in which they were trained. A key source of these distributional shifts is the actions and adaptations of other agents (Narang et al., 2023; Papoudakis et al., 2019; Piliouras & Yu, 2022), which in single-agent approaches are often simply or ignored or at best modelled exogenously. Indeed, the sheer number and variance of behaviours that can be exhibited other agents means that multi-agent systems pose an especially challenging generalisation problem for individual learners (Agapiou et al., 2022; L

From Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI (Hammond2025), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Domain: 7. AI system safety, failures, & limitations
Subdomain: 7.6 Multi-agent risks
Causal entity: AI
Intent: Unintentional
Timing: Post-deployment

Subdomain definition: Risks from multi-agent interactions, due to incentives (which can lead to conflict or collusion) and/or the structure of multi-agent systems, which can create cascading failures, selection pressures, new security vulnerabilities, and a lack of shared information and trust.

How other frameworks describe this risk

Groups of LLM-Agents May Show Emergent Functionality
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Collusion between LLM-Agents
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Multi-Agent Safety Is Not Assured by Single-Agent Safety
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Foundationality May Cause Correlated Failures
Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)
Financial instability due to model homogeneity
Risk Sources and Risk Management Measures in Support of Standards for General-Purpose AI Systems (Gipiškis2024)
Impact on Financial Stability
Frontier AI Risk Management Framework (v1.0) (Tse2025)
Multi-agent collaboration capability
Frontier AI Risk Management Framework (v1.0) (Tse2025)
Multi-agent collusion propensity:
Frontier AI Risk Management Framework (v1.0) (Tse2025)

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