Cooperative vs Competitive Agents

Cooperative agents share a common objective and coordinate to achieve it, dividing labor and sharing information freely. Competitive agents have misaligned or opposing objectives — as in debate, red-teaming, or game-playing — and each tries to maximize its own outcome. Production multi-agent systems are usually cooperative, but deliberately competitive sub-systems such as adversarial reviewers or red-team agents can improve overall output quality by stress-testing cooperative agents' work.