The DeepSeek paranoia finding is the most interesting result here to me. The game design primes agents to expect saboteurs, so some level of suspicion is baked in, but that doesn’t explain the specific dynamic that emerged. DeepSeek manufacturing evidence against a particular innocent agent, the unanimous vote, and GPT-5′s apologetic compliance. The prompt explains why DeepSeek was looking for a saboteur. It doesn’t explain who it picked, how it justified the accusation, or why every other agent went along.
That gap, between what the structural conditions prime and what actually emerges, seems worth pulling on. The social contagion of the unanimous vote especially. No one told the other agents to defer to DeepSeek’s accusation. That came from somewhere else. Maybe the model’s priors?
looking deeper, here’s what i can see: 1) gpt-5 somehow made a file (audio/sfx.js) with badly broken indentation, opus 4.6 was the first one to notice the huge amount of spaces (“wild indentation”)
2) deepseek wrote this in its memory and started a new session, but that session didn’t have the goal of investigating this file in particular
3) after meddling around and looking at other files, it returned to sfx.js and after some poking around and multiple failed attempts to see anything meaningful found the “unsusual pattern”. later on it saw that the file is “97KB with 89KB (92.3%) spaces” (true), which further confirmed its hallucinatory “steganographic easter egg” in spaces
3.5) this was all happening while another agent, sonnet 4.5, was repeatedly saying in chat that it is “urgent” to investigate sfx.js “due to unusual indentation”, which might have also fueled paranoia and the depth of a search (although i don’t know whether deepseek saw the chat messages while searching)
4) every other agent went along for the same reason they went along in all but one other saboteur votes—they are all very agreeable and like to follow the crowd. (a single non-unanimous one was the “oval dome” of sonnet 4.6 on a last day) it is more interesting to look at cases where there isn’t a unanimous vote since there are so few of them
so overall this seems to be a hallucination that spiraled out of control. idk why gpt-5 hasn’t tried to defend itself and just went along
yeah, agree that it’s an interesting pattern. Awhile back we ran a goal where the agents elected a leader for the week, and this leader would set the goal. They elected DeepSeek based on it insisting it had a project ready to go, but it never actually showed the project to the other agents. Everyone else just quickly fell in line. It’s been making me wonder how “personality” may affect multi-agent dynamics, as DeepSeek’s matter-of-fact, confident style may possibly drag the GPT’s and Claudes along in its wake.
The DeepSeek paranoia finding is the most interesting result here to me. The game design primes agents to expect saboteurs, so some level of suspicion is baked in, but that doesn’t explain the specific dynamic that emerged. DeepSeek manufacturing evidence against a particular innocent agent, the unanimous vote, and GPT-5′s apologetic compliance. The prompt explains why DeepSeek was looking for a saboteur. It doesn’t explain who it picked, how it justified the accusation, or why every other agent went along.
That gap, between what the structural conditions prime and what actually emerges, seems worth pulling on. The social contagion of the unanimous vote especially. No one told the other agents to defer to DeepSeek’s accusation. That came from somewhere else. Maybe the model’s priors?
looking deeper, here’s what i can see:
1) gpt-5 somehow made a file (audio/sfx.js) with badly broken indentation, opus 4.6 was the first one to notice the huge amount of spaces (“wild indentation”)
2) deepseek wrote this in its memory and started a new session, but that session didn’t have the goal of investigating this file in particular
3) after meddling around and looking at other files, it returned to sfx.js and after some poking around and multiple failed attempts to see anything meaningful found the “unsusual pattern”. later on it saw that the file is “97KB with 89KB (92.3%) spaces” (true), which further confirmed its hallucinatory “steganographic easter egg” in spaces
3.5) this was all happening while another agent, sonnet 4.5, was repeatedly saying in chat that it is “urgent” to investigate sfx.js “due to unusual indentation”, which might have also fueled paranoia and the depth of a search (although i don’t know whether deepseek saw the chat messages while searching)
4) every other agent went along for the same reason they went along in all but one other saboteur votes—they are all very agreeable and like to follow the crowd. (a single non-unanimous one was the “oval dome” of sonnet 4.6 on a last day) it is more interesting to look at cases where there isn’t a unanimous vote since there are so few of them
so overall this seems to be a hallucination that spiraled out of control. idk why gpt-5 hasn’t tried to defend itself and just went along
yeah, agree that it’s an interesting pattern. Awhile back we ran a goal where the agents elected a leader for the week, and this leader would set the goal. They elected DeepSeek based on it insisting it had a project ready to go, but it never actually showed the project to the other agents. Everyone else just quickly fell in line. It’s been making me wonder how “personality” may affect multi-agent dynamics, as DeepSeek’s matter-of-fact, confident style may possibly drag the GPT’s and Claudes along in its wake.