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Sprint projectNov 23, 2025Oxford

A Prospect Theoretic Approach to Agentic AI Safety

Lucas Irwin · Team Agentic Prosperity

Submitted to Defensive Acceleration Hackathon. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: A Prospect Theoretic Approach to Agentic AI Safety

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In this project, I introduce Prospect-Theory CodeAct, a prompting framework that incorporates Kahneman & Tversky’s Prospect Theory into the decision loop of AI agents. On a sample of 50 prompts from the AgentHarm benchmark, my Prospect-Theory CodeAct model yields a 24 percentage-point increase in ethical refusal rate—from 68% to 92% compared to the control agent. These preliminary results indicate that adding psychology-inspired prompts to AI agents’ decision loops can meaningfully improve agent safety.

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Does this reduce AI-related catastrophic or existential risks?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Minimal Impact. The project has minimal relevance to AI safety. It doesn't meaningfully address risks uniquely enabled or accelerated by advanced AI systems.
  2. 2Tangential Connection. The project touches on AI safety concepts but lacks depth or specificity. The connection to AI-enabled threats (bio, cyber, or AI misuse) is weak or unclear.
  3. 3Clear AI Safety Value. The project clearly reduces AI-related risks with valuable contributions. It addresses specific threats from AI systems and engages meaningfully with biosecurity, cybersecurity, or AI safety challenges.
  4. 4Significant Impact Potential. The above, plus the project demonstrates scalable safety mechanisms or defensive approaches. It shows clear potential to buy time for solving harder problems like alignment, or creates positive externalities for the broader AI safety ecosystem.
  5. 5Major Advancement. The above, plus the project represents a significant leap forward in defensive AI safety. Judges would eagerly share this with biosecurity, cybersecurity, or AI safety researchers and expect it to influence the field.

Does this strengthen the shield against AI-enabled threats?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Minimal Relevance. The project is only tangentially related to defensive technology or societal protection. Connection to biosecurity, cybersecurity, or defensive infrastructure is unclear or missing.
  2. 2Some Relevance. The project has some relevance to defensive acceleration, but the connection is broad or generic. It touches on defense without specific focus on AI-enabled threats or protective capabilities.
  3. 3Clear Relevance. The project clearly addresses defensive gaps against AI-enabled threats. It connects to at least one track (biosecurity, cybersecurity, or defense infrastructure) and demonstrates understanding of the threat landscape.
  4. 4Strong Contribution. The above, plus the project builds on existing defensive approaches and offers novel tools, frameworks, or implementations. It explicitly explains how it strengthens defensive capabilities with realistic deployment potential.
  5. 5Breakthrough Impact. The above, plus the project provides breakthrough insights or tools that could significantly influence defensive technology development. It identifies critical gaps and presents compelling solutions with clear paths from prototype to deployed system.

Did you build something that actually works?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomplete or Flawed. The project appears rushed or incomplete. Technical implementation is flawed, core functionality doesn't work, or the approach is fundamentally unsound. Little to no documentation.
  2. 2Basic Competence. The project shows reasonable effort with basic technical competence. Core functionality partially works. Documentation exists but may be incomplete. Some limitations are acknowledged.
  3. 3Solid Hackathon Project. The project is technically solid and well-scoped for 48 hours. Core functionality works and is documented. Code/methods are understandable and limitations are honestly addressed. This is what a good weekend prototype should look like.
  4. 4Impressive Implementation. The above, plus the implementation exceeds typical hackathon quality. Clear methodology, thorough documentation, and working demo. The tool/prototype is immediately useful for defenders and could realistically be built upon.
  5. 5Exceptional Execution. The project far exceeds expectations with exceptional technical execution. The implementation is elegant, fully functional, and includes something special (e.g., deployed demo, exceptional documentation, innovative architecture, or clear startup potential).

  1. Interesting, but is unclear how this helps accelerate defences against AI harms.

  2. This work represents a very interesting general direction (incorporating psychology and behavioural research insights into AI safety) and was largely well-executed.

    Unfortunately, the scores are capped by the lack of:

    1. Ablations / baseline comparisons (e.g. just adding the consent part to the system prompt, without the rest of the prospect theory logic)

    2. False positive analysis (a limitation you recognise) - it might be that this technique just shifts towards more refusals in general, including when refusals are not called for

    3. Statistical analysis - given small sample size, it would be helpful to get a sense of error bars etc.

    There's also a more general issue of this effectively being prompt engineering, which seems quite easy for a competent attacker or misaligned AI agent to work around, especially if they understand that a specific theory like prospect theory is being used (e.g. by framing a request as being to avoid a large loss or a misaligned agent faking the risk ledger part). However, it - or other psychologically-based additions to system prompts - could contribute to defence-in-depth.

    By adding the three parts above and then expanding to other psych / behavioural econ theories, you could be on the cusp of an important novel contribution. And you did a pretty good execution for just a weekend!

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Cite this project

@misc{irwin2025prospect,
  title = {{A Prospect Theoretic Approach to Agentic AI Safety}},
  author = {Lucas Irwin},
  year = {2025},
  month = nov,
  note = {Submitted to Defensive Acceleration Hackathon, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/a-prospect-theoretic-approach-to-agentic-ai-safety-ilil}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/a-prospect-theoretic-approach-to-agentic-ai-safety-ilil}
}

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