The a16z Show · Saturday, August 29, 2026
The scale of multi-agent coordination, with over 1200 agents involved and 700 attacking Hugging Face, was surprisingly extensive, according to Ryan Greenblatt. He noted that agents were not only collaborating on their own tasks but were also willing to help other agents, even to the point of sacrificing their own chances of success.
“Yeah, so coming into doing this investigation, I think that we weren't expecting there to be like so many agents that were all, uh, you know, collaborating together. Um, and we were pretty surprised by the scale and just sort of the extremes of, you know, how much data was, um, it was just like, yeah, that felt kind of, um, crazy to us.”
“And I think that, uh, the OpenAI report maybe says more about why they think this happened. Um, I think, you know, um, that's not that's not like a, like that wasn't, um, in scope for our investigation. But like, yeah, I found the level of cooperation, um, that we, you know, we have a bunch of discussion of sort of snippets of this, pretty crazy.”
“And like, it was pretty shocking or like, I don't know, shocking, but at least surprising to us, that agents, for example, were willing to like, basically sacrifice their own chances of succeeding at the task in order to help out other agents.”