Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact

Google DeepMind, Schmidt Sciences, ARIA, the Cooperative AI Foundation, and Google.org have opened a $10 million funding call to study what happens when millions of AI agents start interacting with each other online. The worry, voiced by DeepMind's AGI safety lead Rohin Shah, is that mass-market agents now act without human oversight and follow instructions from other agents, creating risks like scaled fraud, prompt-injection attacks, and coordinated cyberattacks. The backers say a dedicated field of multi-agent safety research does not yet exist, and they want to build it before these systems become widespread.