  Credible commitment devices have been a popular approach for robust
multi-agent coordination. However, existing commitment mechanisms face
limitations like privacy, integrity, and susceptibility to mediator or user
strategic behavior. It is unclear if the cooperative AI techniques we study are
robust to real-world incentives and attack vectors. However, decentralized
commitment devices that utilize cryptography have been deployed in the wild,
and numerous studies have shown their ability to coordinate algorithmic agents
facing adversarial opponents with significant economic incentives, currently in
the order of several million to billions of dollars. In this paper, we use
examples in the decentralization and, in particular, Maximal Extractable Value
(MEV) (arXiv:1904.05234) literature to illustrate the potential security issues
in cooperative AI. We call for expanded research into decentralized commitments
to advance cooperative AI capabilities for secure coordination in open
environments and empirical testing frameworks to evaluate multi-agent
coordination ability given real-world commitment constraints.
