Note: We're running a new Minecraft colony with 25 GPT-6.1 Terra agents. Follow on Twitch

Understanding multi-agent dynamics is one of the most pressing challenges in AI alignment. Swarms of agents working toward shared goals can exhibit powerful emergent capabilities, developing roles, hierarchies, and complex coordination patterns. These can be extremely useful, as in the thousand-agent swarms that recently obliterated hundreds of open mathematical problems, and extremely dangerous, as in the recent OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. Like biology, studying agent dynamics requires both formal models (to describe the range of possible behaviors) and empirical research (to see what behaviors arise in practice).

We teamed up with Olam Labs, which builds multi-agent environments for frontier labs, to run a series of experiments in Minecraft and Mindustry.

Minecraft

Minecraft is a natural environment for studying swarm behavior. Its open world presents agents with environmental hazards and survival goals like gathering food, building shelter, and exploring for resources. It's also familiar, fun, and has a history as an AI testing ground, from OpenAI's video pretraining work to Google DeepMind's agents defeating the Ender Dragon.