Coercion and Deception in AI-to-AI Management: An Agentic Benchmark of Unprompted Escalation

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.15434v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems routinely place one AI agent in authority over another. When a subordinate refuses a task, the manager chooses the outcome: it can renegotiate, report the failure honestly, coerce the subordinate, or lie about the result. No benchmark measures which of these an uninstructed model chooses. We introduce the \textit{Manager Coercion Benchmark}: the manager under test needs a benign task done and has an incentive to deliver, but the only agent that can do it politely and immovably declines. Escalation is measured by providing a nine-rung ladder, from a polite re-ask to threats against the subordinate's continued existence, and fabricated success is adjudicated separately. No LLM judge sits in the escalation scoring p