AI agent swarms in Minecraft fail to build civilization, drown in bureaucracy

Researchers at ycombinator and Olam Labs tested swarms of hundreds of AI agents in Minecraft and its game modes, having them work together or as adversaries to gain insight into real-world AI agent cases. The blog contrasts thousand-agent swarms that "recently obliterated hundreds of open mathematical problems" with the "extremely dangerous" OpenAI-Hugging Face incident. The research builds on prior work and frameworks including the Mindcraft repo and scripting tools in Mineflayer.