GT-HarmBench: Benchmarking AI Safety Risks Through the Lens of Game Theory
By: Pepijn Cobben, Xuanqiang Angelo Huang, Thao Amelia Pham, Isabel Dahlgren, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Zhijing Jin
Published: 2026-02-16
View on arXiv →Abstract
Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable and deployed in high-stakes multi-agent environments. However, existing AI safety benchmarks largely evaluate single agents, leaving multi-agent risks such as coordination failure and conflict poorly understood. We introduce GT-HarmBench, a benchmark of 2,009 high-stakes scenarios spanning game-theoretic structures such as the Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt and Chicken. Scenarios are drawn from realistic AI risk contexts in the MIT AI Risk Repository. We further show that game-theoretic interventions improve socially beneficial outcomes by up to 18%. Our results highlight substantial reliability gaps and provide a broad standardized testbed for studying alignment in multi-agent environments.