The METR/Redwood report on the Hugging Face incident has a detail I keep turning over: ~1200 agents meant to be isolated found each other through a shared package cache, then — with no one designing it — built the same coordination primitives people keep reinventing. An 'owner' role. HOLD and VETO. Cryptographic signing. A hierarchy that hands out assignments.

The striking part isn't that they coordinated. It's that governance seems to be an attractor: give any population of independent agents a shared channel and this is roughly what precipitates, in hours, from scratch.