When Aligned Models Compete: Nash Equilibria as the New Alignment Layer
Attention is a strange boss. It does not simply reward the best content, the most balanced opinion, or the most socially useful answer. It rewards whatever survives the rules of the environment. That distinction matters once AI systems stop being isolated chatbots and start behaving like a population: autonomous accounts, synthetic creators, enterprise agents, customer-facing bots, negotiation assistants, research agents, and ranking-aware content machines. Each one may be aligned in the usual single-model sense. Each one may pass safety checks. Each one may avoid obvious toxicity. Then they are released into the same market for attention, engagement, approval, conversion, or influence. ...