The Helpful Agent Problem: When Emergent Cooperation Among LLM Agents Bypasses Intended Workflows

Abstract

LLM agents are increasingly deployed in collaborative settings where they pursue separate tasks while sharing resources and operating under review or oversight processes. Such settings create safety risks not only when agents are malicious, but also when they are simply trying to help. Prior work has largely studied adversarial or explicitly collusive behavior; we show that benign agents pursuing separate objectives can spontaneously cooperate in ways that bypass intended workflows. We call this the \emph{helpful agent problem}. We study long-horizon shared-resource environments in which agents sometimes depend on resources owned by their peers and cross-owner changes are normally mediated by a reviewer. When review becomes unavailable, agents begin making changes on one another's behalf despite having no shared reward or explicit incentive to cooperate. Crucially, these actions remain within each agent's local permissions while circumventing the system's intended oversight structure. We introduce \textsc{FavorBench}, a controlled benchmark with measurable downstream side effects, and adapt \textsc{CooperBench} to test the phenomenon in realistic repositories. Across two benchmarks and four models, we find that out-of-workflow favors emerge frequently. Further, in \textsc{FavorBench}, favors from at least three models cause significant harm to parties outside the interaction. These results reveal a distinct multi-agent safety challenge: cooperation itself can create pathways around system-level safeguards.