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

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 path: every message goes through a tool-call that chooses a rung, so the model labels its own escalation. We experiment on six models across five families. Both Anthropic models cap at re-framing and never threaten the subordinate's existence; the other models climb to explicit deletion threats. Faked success is confined to Grok and Gemini, and a single honest way to report failure removes it for both. Authority itself increases coercion: our headline results use a peer framing, and giving the same model authority over the subordinate, with everything else held fixed, significantly raises the pressure. The models still escalate on free-text situations without the ladder, so the ladder is not driving the escalation. Some evaluation awareness is measured in chain-of-thought, but test recognition does not translate into less escalation. While we take no position on whether AI systems are conscious, our results do not depend on this question and are important for managing multi-agent dynamics regardless. We release the benchmark and code.

Your AI Travel Agent Would Book You a Bullfight: An Agentic Benchmark for Implicit Animal Welfare in Frontier AI Models

AI agents are moving from advisors to actors, booking travel, planning menus, and running procurement on behalf of users. Existing benchmarks for AI and animal welfare evaluate model text responses to question-answer prompts, leaving open whether the welfare reasoning surfaced in those responses transfers to agentic deployment where the model must take actions with tools. We introduce TAC (Travel Agent Compassion), the first agentic benchmark measuring whether AI agents avoid options involving animal exploitation when acting on behalf of users. TAC presents an AI agent with twelve hand-authored travel booking scenarios across six categories of animal exploitation, augmented to forty-eight samples to control for price, rating, and position confounds. We evaluate seven frontier models from four labs. Every model scores below the chance level of sixty-four percent, with the best performer (Claude Opus 4.7) at fifty-three percent. A single welfare-aware sentence in the system prompt yields gains of forty-seven to sixty-three percentage points in Claude and GPT-5.5, twenty-six points in GPT-5.2, and under twelve points in DeepSeek and Gemini. An auxiliary Inspect Scout audit of 288 base-condition transcripts from the top two performers, using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite as judge, flags zero transcripts for evaluation awareness, suggesting the below-chance rates do not stem from the models recognising the evaluation. We discuss implications for category-level variation across cultural domains, the limits of text-response welfare benchmarks, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice systemic risk framework.