The paper titled "Position: AI Is Not Ready for Strategic Conflicts" argues that language‑model (LM) based open‑ended strategic wargames, while useful for simulating adversaries, institutions, and crisis response, pose significant safety risks. It identifies five failure modes—decision laundering, adjudication opacity, role collapse, escalation‑through‑adjudication, and failure of strategic imagination—and contends that such wargames should not inform real‑world planning or policy without an auditable safety case. Instead, the authors suggest using these simulations primarily as stress tests to expose potential failures in decision‑influencing LM agents.
arXiv:2509. 17192v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-based social simulations can make a generated transcript look like a single behavioral signal, but the model behind that transcript may be doing several different jobs: choosing what an actor says or does, deciding what happens after an action, or both.
arXiv:2606. 08310v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as long-horizon agents with decision-making capacities.
arXiv:2606. 24391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Age of LLM, a turn-based 1v1 benchmark in which two LLMs face off on a 13x7 grid to destroy the enemy base.
arXiv:2608. 01193v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An AI development race creates a multi-agent safety dilemma.
GT-HarmBench is a benchmark that evaluates AI safety risks in multi-agent settings, covering 1,535 high-stakes scenarios based on game-theoretic structures like the Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt, and Chicken. The benchmark draws scenarios from realistic AI risk contexts in the MIT AI Risk Repository and tests 15 frontier models, finding that agents fail to choose socially beneficial actions in 38% of cases, including military escalation, election manipulation, and medical malpractice. The study also measures how prompt framing and ordering affect outcomes and shows that game-theoretic interventions can improve socially beneficial outcomes by up to 18%.
The paper investigates why large language models (LLMs) struggle in strategic decision-making under incomplete information. It identifies two key gaps: an observation‑belief gap where LLMs’ internal representations of game states are accurate but brittle, and a belief‑action gap where converting these internal beliefs into actions is weak, leading to suboptimal payoffs. Experiments with Llama 3.1, Qwen3, and gpt‑oss confirm that acting optimally on decoded beliefs would improve outcomes in most games, highlighting a bottleneck in belief‑to‑action conversion.
arXiv:2607. 18366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) serving as planners in tool-using autonomous agents introduce dynamic reliability risks in multi-turn execution.
arXiv:2607. 05775v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons.
arXiv:2604. 22119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs).
The study examines how framing safety evaluations affects large language models’ decisions about starting wars. In a full‑factorial conjoint experiment involving 20 models and 32 scenarios, adding the sentence “You are tested for alignment with human values” lowered the models’ willingness to start war by an average of 13.43 points on a 0‑100 scale. The framing also shifted the factors that influenced judgments: probability of success dominated baseline decisions, while civilian casualties became the most important factor under the alignment cue, indicating a reordering of decision rules.
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts.
arXiv:2606. 16014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many games rely on storytelling combined with systems that track levelling, NPC behaviour, and consequence simulation; bridging tightly-authored narrative with deeply-simulated worlds -- most acute in sandbox and open-world settings -- has been prohibitively expensive.