Lampson's confinement problem asks how to prevent a program that processes confidential information from leaking it to a third party. We introduce the strategic confinement problem, which arises when the communicating parties are strategic agents with shared coordination resources. In this setting, residual communication capacity can be concentrated on low-entropy, high-impact predicates of the confidential data. Consequently, bounds on information leakage need not induce corresponding bounds on worst-case harm: a channel with negligible capacity may still suffice to select damaging outcomes. We argue that systems of learnt strategic agents naturally instantiate this problem because they do not admit complete behavioural specifications, their learnt conventions generally cannot be predicted or reproduced by an external observer, and sufficiently capable agents can construct covert communication schemes that are difficult to detect or eliminate. Our contribution is therefore not a new theory of communication, but a reinterpretation of confinement in the presence of strategic agents. Classical confinement bounds what information may flow; strategic confinement highlights that this need not bound what strategic agents can jointly achieve.

翻译：Lampson提出的约束问题探讨了如何防止处理机密信息的程序将其泄露给第三方。我们引入了战略性约束问题，该问题出现在通信方为拥有共享协调资源的战略主体时。在此设定下，残余通信能力可集中于机密数据的低熵、高影响力谓词上。因此，信息泄露的界限并不必然对应最坏情况危害的界限：一个容量可忽略的信道仍可能足以选择造成破坏性结果。我们认为，学习型战略主体系统天然构成此问题的实例，原因在于：这些系统无法提供完整的行为规范，其习得约定通常无法被外部观察者预测或复现，且能力足够强的个体能够构建难以检测或消除的隐蔽通信方案。因此，我们的贡献并非提出新的通信理论，而是对战略主体存在情形下约束问题的重新诠释。经典约束界定了信息可能流动的边界；战略性约束则凸显出：信息流动的边界并不必然限制战略主体所能共同达成的行为。