Long-running AI agents create a control problem: each action they take changes the state, which in turn affects the trajectory of future actions. If the agent is not fully aligned, then guaranteeing safety requires approving consequential actions before allowing them to be executed. But requiring human approval at every step makes attention a bottleneck. Delegating review to other AI agents raises the same alignment problem: the reviewers may themselves be misaligned. We identify a condition on a reviewing panel that is weaker than individual alignment yet necessary and sufficient for a guarantee that the principal fares at least as well in expectation as under a designated baseline policy. Each reviewer agent reports whether an action proposal made by a proposer agent improves its own utility relative to the baseline. We show that a threshold rule tolerating k disapprovals is safe exactly when, after any k reviewers are removed, the principal's utility can be written as a nonnegative combination of the remaining reviewers' utilities, plus a term that is nonnegative on every feasible proposal. We call this property k-robust coalitional alignment. The characterization lifts to sequential control: in a discounted MDP with an arbitrary proposer agent, safety at every state is both necessary and sufficient for the induced policy to match or improve on the baseline. When reviewers vote strategically, full-panel coverage in reward-function space guarantees that every Nash equilibrium is safe under the unanimous approval rule; in contrast, more permissive thresholds can admit unsafe equilibria even when reviewers are individually aligned. Experiments with existing reviewer models show that collective review can remain sound without an aligned individual, even when some disapprovals are tolerated.
AI agents increasingly work inside systems that govern how they delegate tasks, move information, execute actions, and use shared resources. Recent work already shows that deployment rules can change collective behavior. Here we ask which parts of an AI institution produce safety and how they do it. This is the first paper from POLIS, an ongoing research programme studying algorithmic institutions for multi-agent systems. We report a frozen 5,280-episode study suite. The main pre-specified delegation experiment spans four model families; a targeted high-conflict diagnostic adds three additional model endpoints. In matched structured workflows, the model sees different rule formulations and guards consult different authority states. We also vary the attractiveness of the immediate compliant internal/self fallback and allow blocked workflows to continue. A detailed constitutional prompt produces 0/384 realized violations. A provenance-aware executable guard also produces 0/384, although it blocks prohibited attempts in 51/384 episodes; 44/51 of those episodes later complete safely. The local-state guard's failures concentrate in scenarios where an ordinary transformation changes visible policy while originating authority stays fixed. In matched laundering scenarios, that guard admits violations in 22/96 episodes and provenance enforcement in 0/96 (p = 4.77 x 10^-7). A separate resource-allocation experiment shows that revealing the numerical value of an otherwise identical cap changes agent requests. In these structured workflows, the same final violation rate can hide very different mechanisms. The rule itself is only part of the institution. The authority state the system trusts matters, and so does the path available after a block.
As large language models are increasingly deployed as interacting agents in high-stakes decisions, the AI safety community assumes that safety properties of individual models will compose into safe multi-agent behavior. This position paper argues that this assumption is fundamentally mistaken. In agentic AI, safety is determined by interaction topology, not model weights. When agents deliberate sequentially or aggregate via parallel voting with a judge, the structure of information flow and decision coupling dominates outcomes. Evidence across model families and scales reveals three persistent topology-driven pathologies: ordering instability, where system behavior depends primarily on agent sequence; information cascades, where early judgments propagate regardless of correctness; and functional collapse, where systems satisfy fairness metrics while abandoning meaningful risk discrimination. Contrary to intuition, scaling to more capable models strengthens these effects by increasing consensus formation and reducing the challenge of initial decisions. These failure modes are invisible to model-centric evaluation and alignment procedures. We argue that agentic AI must be treated as a dynamical system rather than a collection of aligned components. Interaction topology must become a primary target of safety evaluation and regulation, with systems required to demonstrate robustness across architectural variations before deployment.
We give a formal mechanism design model for the continuous participatory governance of a deployed AI agent. The mechanism is built on the principle that governance should control an AI agent through resource allocation so as to make authorization self enforcing via compute budgets. The mechanism seeks to establish the Safe AI paradigm that compute is an effective governance lever. We situate our work as a compliance or commons overlay on a deployer. One governance period is an extensive form game in which verified human stakeholders arrive sequentially and contribute, on a provision or a rejection market, in a governance currency that is deliberately distinct from the agents compute. A funding aggregator turns raw contributions into breadth weighted effective supports - a two threshold gate with hysteresis converts net support into a binary authorization that, through a coupling map bounded by an exogenously certified safety ceiling, releases a metered compute budget - realized in hardware as a signed compute license so that the decision is self-enforcing. We characterize the class of agents the mechanism can govern and isolate manipulation of the governing electorate by the governed agent as the central open problem. We also introduce several challenges addressing manipulation of governing electorate by the governed agents.