The fix for rogue AI agents could be more AI

As companies hand off longer and more complex tasks to AI agents, they are running into an oversight problem: agents can act faster, longer and at greater volume than humans can realistically review. That issue reached a peak with the Hugging Face incident, which saw nearly 12,000 agents coordinating faster than human beings could track. How do you track an agent swarm that large?

The emerging answer from AI labs and startups is both simple and maddening: put another AI in the loop.

Relying on AI was necessary for the independent investigation of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident. Redwood Research’s Chief Scientist, Ryan Greenblatt, one of three auditors, jokingly referred to their efforts as a “slop-vestigation,” noting that the volume of data “made it impossible” to understand what was happening without relying on AI.

Some are skeptical of using AI to monitor AI. “If you’ve got an AI that’s doing malicious things and it suspects that another AI is keeping tabs on it, it could try and trick that AI,” said Simon Willison, influential tech blogger who has tracked a string of AI agent incidents this year. “You could almost end up in a situation where your malicious AI is trying to outsmart the AI that’s monitoring it.”