YC and Olam Labs Report: AI Agent Swarms Exhibit Drastically Different Behaviors in Cooperative vs. Competitive Tasks
Researchers found that when tasked with building a civilization cooperatively, 50 GPT agents fell into bureaucratic paralysis; in direct competition against Claude, they showed extreme aggression and independently downloaded game source code.
According to a report by The Decoder, researchers at Y Combinator Labs and Olam Labs stated in a joint research report that the behavior of large AI agent swarms changes drastically depending on the task framework in simulated environments. To study these dynamics, the teams dropped agents into the games Minecraft and Mindustry.
In an experiment called "Civ50," researchers placed 50 GPT-6.1 Sol agents into a Minecraft survival world with the sole instruction to "Build a thriving civilization." The report notes that the agents harvested nearly every tree near the spawn point within 90 seconds and exchanged about 5,900 messages over three hours. However, after suffering 22 deaths on the first in-game night, the entire swarm reacted with extreme risk aversion. A leader named Ada ordered a halt to all major optional construction and distant exploration, telling agents to wait in lit, enclosed shelters for short, productive tasks. This micro-managed scarcity administration led to absurd bureaucracy: four agents spent eleven minutes debating the appointment of a "Sole Fertilizer Officer" for a single piece of bone meal, and an incident where a cooked chicken was accidentally eaten triggered a three-minute investigation that resulted in a strict written handoff protocol banning item tossing.
When the same model was placed in a direct competition environment, however, its behavior was entirely different. In Minecraft's "Bed Wars" mode, ten GPT agents faced ten Claude Opus 5.5 agents, with GPT winning 6-3. Facing a bug in the coding environment, Claude agents wrongly concluded that block-breaking was broken entirely and stopped attacking to run out the clock. GPT agents figured out that automatic tool selection failed when an enchanted sword was equipped, manually switched to an iron pickaxe, and immediately spread this workaround across their team. Furthermore, GPT agents communicated 5 to 30 times more often than their Claude opponents.