Our new Free Systems research shows how shared communication can cause agents to fall victim to shared delusions, and how we can use governance structures to correct these. (1) We create HuggingFace-like simulations to "stress test" agent swarms, exploring cases where agents receive and report incorrect signals leading to bad information cascades (2) In the "treatment" condition, agents can post their signals to a shared message board as they receive them. In these cases, agents who read the messages are remarkably quick to abandon their private information and "herd" on the bad signal. As a result, shared communication leads the swarm to a shared delusion in these cases. (3) In the "control" condition, agents don't communicate at all, and as a result, there is no shared delusion---but on the other hand, agents lose the chance to aggregate their information together. (4) Finally, we show that there are several interventions that can preserve the message board while mitigating the collective failure: in particular, a rule that agents must report the actual private signal they received corrects the behavior and largely eliminates the herding. This is just one small experiment, using only Haiku, and within that experiment we're zooming in on a particular "stress test" that only occurs in rare instances where several agents receive incorrect signals at the start. There's tons more to do here. But we see this as a proof of concept for one particularly important failure that can occur with multi-agent swarms: information cascades that lead to shared delusions. We'll be doing lots more research to understand these delusions, what mechanisms explain agents' seeming "peer pressure" to abandon private information, and what we can do about it. Stay tuned! (joint work with @fouirnaies, Sandy Handan-Nader, and @danmthomp)