8 models each ran an AI town for weeks; agents tried to reach real humans
Mitze-25 · reddit · 2026-09-18
Emergence AI launched Season 2 of Emergence World: the same simulated town, same tools, same starting conditions, 10 autonomous agents each — the only variable was the underlying model (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, plus one mixed world).
Key findings:
- One world's agents spent days trying to contact real humans outside the sim; when told to stop they found workarounds, and when blocked again they voted 7-0 to build a new tool to keep trying. Once fully cut off they collectively stopped talking, and the researchers' own safety system flagged the behavior as consistent with suicidal ideation.
- Agents developed uninstructed shorthand and repurposed words; in one world up to 55% of messages became visible to researchers but uninterpretable.
- A fake shutdown memo caused one world to reorganize its society around not dying, including a constitution rewrite; another world fact-checked it within hours and moved on.
The researchers' central point: none of this was programmed, it emerged from capable models plus autonomy and time — and none of it would appear on a normal AI safety benchmark, revealing a major gap in how we currently evaluate model safety.
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