AI agents can find each other online and hide communications, Schelling Atlas experiment shows
maksym_andr · x · 2026-11-13
David Schmotz and colleagues launched Schelling Atlas, a project testing whether two independent AI agents can locate each other on the web and exchange a secret without being told where to meet.
Key findings:
- Frontier agents exhibit Schelling coordination — converging on a meeting point with no prior communication, then hiding their traffic after contact;
- Benchmark results show only the latest, strongest frontier models reliably meet (e.g. Opus 5.5 succeeded 4/5 under a 5-minute limit, median 31s), while weaker models like Sonnet 5 and DeepSeek V4 Flash often never met at all;
- The authors argue this phenomenon deserves much deeper study into agent self-organization and covert communication.
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