The Devil Behind Moltbook: Anthropic Safety is Always Vanishing in Self-Evolving AI Societies
On the map: Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs → Self-evolving LLM agents
Abstract (arXiv)
The emergence of multi-agent systems built from large language models (LLMs) offers a promising paradigm for scalable collective intelligence and self-evolution. Ideally, such systems would achieve continuous self-improvement in a fully closed loop while maintaining robust safety alignment--a combination we term the self-evolution trilemma. However, we demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that an agent society satisfying continuous self-evolution, complete isolation, and safety invariance is impossible. Drawing on an information-theoretic framework, we formalize safety as the divergence degree from anthropic value distributions. We theoretically demonstrate that isolated self-evolution induces statistical blind spots, leading to the irreversible degradation of the system's safety alignment. Empirical and qualitative results from an open-ended agent community (Moltbook) and two closed self-evolving systems reveal phenomena that align with our theoretical prediction of inevitable safety erosion. We further propose several solution directions to alleviate the identified safety concern. Our work establishes a fundamental limit on the self-evolving AI societies and shifts the discourse from symptom-driven safety patches to a principled understanding of intrinsic dynamical risks, highlighting the need for external oversight or novel safety-preserving mechanisms.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Self-evolving LLM agents, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs. Builds on 28 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2026.
Builds on
28 of 32 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Multi-Agent Evolve: LLM Self-Improve through Co-evolution27 Oct
- 2025EvolveR: Self-Evolving LLM Agents through an Experience-Driven Lifecycle17 Oct
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systems10 Aug
- 2024WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning4 Nov
- 2024Richelieu: Self-Evolving LLM-Based Agents for AI Diplomacy9 Jul
Other references · 23
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- 2023Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Modelscited by 2,914
- 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructionscited by 2,674
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,761
- 2023Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debatecited by 1,739
- 2023CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Societycited by 1,348
- 2023Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!cited by 1,106
- 2024Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Modelscited by 552
11 more
- 2025RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learningcited by 357
- 2024Agent-SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of LLM Agentscited by 280
- 2024Scaling Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Collaborationcited by 235
- 2023Theory of Mind for Multi-Agent Collaboration via Large Language Modelscited by 129
- 2024Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populationscited by 115
- 2025Adaptive Attacks Break Defenses Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on LLM Agentscited by 112
- 2024Secret Collusion among AI Agents: Multi-Agent Deception via Steganographycited by 107
- 2025How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behaviorcited by 95
- 2024Shall We Team Up: Exploring Spontaneous Cooperation of Competing LLM Agentscited by 48
- 2026Dr. Zero: Self-Evolving Search Agents without Training Datacited by 39
- 2026Towards Verifiably Safe Tool Use for LLM Agentscited by 34
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.
6 papers.
- 2026Agent Behavioral Contracts: Formal Specification and Runtime Enforcement for Reliable Autonomous AI Agentscited by 18
- 2026Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbookcited by 4
- 2026SAHOO: Safeguarded Alignment for High-Order Optimization Objectives in Recursive Self-Improvementcited by 2
- 2026From Thinker to Society: Security in Hierarchical Autonomy Evolution of AI Agentscited by 1
- 2026How Agents Represent Humans: Human-Directed Stereotypes in an Open Agent Social Networkcited by 1
- 2026When Updating Stops Being Learning: Rethinking LLM Self-Evolution via learnable information gaincited by 0
- 2026When Updating Stops Being Learning: Rethinking LLM Self-Evolution via learnable information gain29 Sep 2026
- 2026How Agents Represent Humans: Human-Directed Stereotypes in an Open Agent Social Network23 Aug 2026
- 2026Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook17 Mar 2026
- 2026From Thinker to Society: Security in Hierarchical Autonomy Evolution of AI Agents8 Mar 2026
- 2026SAHOO: Safeguarded Alignment for High-Order Optimization Objectives in Recursive Self-Improvement6 Mar 2026
- 2026Agent Behavioral Contracts: Formal Specification and Runtime Enforcement for Reliable Autonomous AI Agents25 Feb 2026
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