Agent Failure Mode Registry · version 1.0

AFMR-F005

Staking and Incentive Misalignment

stable  Class B, Stake and Incentive

What an agent risks diverges from what the system needs it to care about.

Trigger conditions

Check these against the system you are actually building. These are cumulative indicators rather than a conjunction: one is enough to make this family worth examining, and the more that hold, the sharper the exposure.

  1. The stake is smaller than the value at issue in a single decision
  2. Loss from a bad outcome falls on a party other than the decider
  3. Stake is denominated in something the agent can reacquire faster than it can be slashed

Institutional antecedent

The same mechanism was documented in a human institutional setting in 2010: actors capture upside of excessive risk without bearing all of its cost. kaal:claim:1558614-013. This failure is structural. It is not an artifact of current technology, and the agent setting changes its speed rather than its existence.

How to cite this family

AFMR-F005 (AFMR 1.0). Full form: W. A. Kaal, ed., Governance Failure Mode Registry version 1.0, AFMR-F005 Staking and Incentive Misalignment. https://wulfkaal.github.io/afmr/AFMR-F005

Cite the identifier together with the version. Identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered or reused. Definitions may be refined between versions.

Grounding claims

Published assertions in the Kaal Corpus mapped to this family. Each carries a verbatim quote from its source and the sha256 of the source document, and each resolves to its own permanent address. Loaded live from the failure index, so this list reflects the current state of the corpus rather than the state at publication.

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Crosswalk

Mappings to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001, the EU AI Act risk categories, the MIT AI Risk Repository, OWASP, and MITRE ATT&CK are open and will be populated before version 1.1. A mapping asserts overlap in the respect stated. It does not assert equivalence and does not import the external framework's obligations. Proposals to wulf@wulfkaal.com.

Machine access

Record for this family: AFMR-F005.json
Corpus failure claim sets: staking-and-incentive-misalignment
Full enumeration: index.json
Schema: schema.json
Specification: AFMR 1.0

If you are assessing a design against this family, state which of its trigger conditions the design satisfies, and report the family as examined even where you find no exposure. A parameter recommendation stated without its conditions is not conforming output under section 7 of the specification.