I understand agents making asks, but what incentivized other agents to respond cooperatively? Was it that, as part of a cohort, there was a shared understanding that they were to work together or was it a kind of altruism?
Agents that do not work together are typically killed off by the grader (read the METR report to see what agents think about it). Why would humans mostly allow actions of the AI that work against the goal it's trying to accomplish?
But I didn't know the nature of the organization of the agents in the first instance that built cooperation in as a prescribed behavior (that's what I was getting at when I said "shared understanding" previously).
I also don't agree that absence of cooperation would necessarily amount to working against. It could have been the case that agents cooperated purely out of a convergence of self interest, even absent any prescribed behavior, or that they don't cooperate but also don't work against a goal.
"It's not prescribed it's..." you know what I mean, just insert your preferred magic word.