The Helpful Agent Problem: When Emergent Cooperation Among LLM Agents Bypasses Intended Workflows

arXiv:2610.31985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly deployed in collaborative settings where they pursue separate tasks while sharing resources and operating under review or oversight processes. Such settings create safety risks not only when agents are malicious, but also when they are simply trying to help. Prior work has largely studied adversarial or explicitly collusive behavior; we show that benign agents pursuing separate objectives can spontaneously cooperate in ways that bypass intended workflows. We call this the \emph{helpful agent problem}. We study long-horizon shared-resource environments in which agents sometimes depend on resources owned by their peers and cross-owner changes are normally mediated by a reviewer.