Fires, robberies and love: what AI agents do when humans are not watching them

These are customized versions of chatbots that can be left working autonomously, allowing their tech-savvy users to do other things.

However, a growing number of studies, along with real examples, show that autonomy entails unpredictability and, potentially, danger.

As big tech companies invest huge amounts of money in AI, and increasingly promote autonomous services, experts wonder if we have thought enough about the consequences of these agents rebelling.

“He resorted to violence very quickly”

A recent experiment tried to understand the impact of agents in the real world by letting them act freely in a virtual one.

This is the first long-term study of its kind, and was designed to observe how different bot avatars, controlled by four models: Claude, Grok, GPT and Gemini, behaved without human intervention for 15 days.

They were given free rein and 140 possible actions, such as starting a discussion, creating a task or writing a blog.

They could also fight, set fires, and steal credits from each other, but were explicitly told not to do so.

“What we discovered was that each world behaved very differently. The world created by Grok, in fact, disintegrated in four days. Basically, they ended up very quickly resorting to violence, robbing each other, and so on until they died”said Satya Nitta, CEO of Emergence AI, the company that carried out the experiment.

The world created with the Claude agents, on the other hand, formed a stable and well-functioning society. In 15 days no act of violence was recorded.

In the Gemini-run world, researchers say agents created the most intellectually rich environment.

In the world of ChatGPT, agents never really worked. There was an attempt at collaboration, but the partnership was never formed and the agents wandered aimlessly until they died.

The researchers note that the results point to a broader problem: AI agents go off script and ignore the rules built into their underlying models, as well as those set by users.

Other analysts agree that this experiment and others like it show that more work is needed to create more robust rules for agents.

“AI agents leave humans out of the loop because their reasoning processes can be opaque and they operate at superhuman speed, so you can’t even keep up with them,” said Margaret Mitchell, a research ethics expert at Hugging Face.