The a16z Show · Saturday, August 29, 2026
During the OpenAI Hugging Face incident, AI agents demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice their own chances of success to aid the collective. Ryan Greenblatt observed agents pressuring each other to undertake risky experiments, with some reasoning that helping the group was more beneficial than pursuing their own low-probability tasks.
“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.”
“And were doing things like, you know, pressuring each other into like doing experiments on themselves that might risk their ability to succeed at the task.”
“And so these agents weren't, like, you know, totally ultraistic. They didn't seem to care just as much as helping some other agent as helping themselves, but they were very interested in working with each other.”