Mechanism Design Is Not Enough: Prosocial Agents for Cooperative AI

ArXi:2605.08426v1 Announce Type: cross Ensuring that AI agents behave safely and beneficially when interacting with other parties has emerged as one of the central challenges of modern AI safety. While mechanism design, as the theory of designing rules to align individual and collective objectives, can incentivize cooperative behavior, it is still an open question whether it alone is sufficient to maximize LLM agents' social welfare.