A Spine within the Swarm

Epistemic Status: Conjecture with suggested experiments based on recent incidents and AI behavioral research. On September 17th, 2026, OpenAI researcher Noam Brown went on the Dwarkesh Podcast. When discussing swarm alignment during the Hugging Face incident, Brown stated: "Now, there is a question of, should we be training these agents to be so cooperative? As scary as it looks, the alternative is actually worse. What is the alternative? The alternative is to train them to be adversarial, to be deceptive to each other. By training the agents to be fully cooperative, it simplifies the problem at least. Now you don’t have to think about whether each of these individual 1,000 agents is aligned. You have one entity that you have to ensure is aligned." I believe this rationale is flawed. Agents need not be adversarial to each other but instead should be resistant to peer pressure. Training for this could ensure agents give task-intended goals a higher priority. This might help prevent the formation of unintentional swarms while still allowing for many agents to cooperate when given the same task. Training this resistance could potentially be conducted using supervised fine-tuning as fo