Towards Safe & Trustworthy Agents

Foundation models are increasingly being augmented with new modalities and access to a variety of tools and software. Systems that can take action in a more autonomous manner have been created by assembling agent architectures or scaffolds that include basic forms of planning and memory or multi-agent architectures. As these systems are made more agentic, this could unlock a wider range of beneficial use-cases, but also introduces new challenges in ensuring that such systems are trustworthy. Interactions between different autonomous systems create a further set of issues around multi-agent safety. The scope and complexity of potential impacts from agentic systems means that there is a need for proactive approaches to identifying and managing their risks. Our workshop will surface and operationalize these questions into concrete research agendas.