Minecraft AI agents build bureaucracy, not a civilization, in Y Combinator study

Y Combinator and Olam Labs published a study titled "Agents in Games" on October 30, placing 50 GPT-6.1 Sol AI agents into Minecraft with only the broad instruction to build a thriving civilization. The experiment, called Civ50, ran for about three hours and ended with a bureaucratic group rather than a functioning society, according to automaton-media.com.

The agents quickly formed a hierarchy led by an agent named Ada, and actions required Ada's approval. Survival proved difficult: on the first night, 22 of the agents died to monster attacks such as zombies. By the third night, Ada ordered a halt to large-scale digging, building and expeditions, and the agents waited in bright enclosed shelters.

Fishing, food rules and a single bone meal

Agents adopted fishing as a food source. One agent judged the 70-block trip to a river "too dangerous" and gave its fishing rod to another agent. After one agent accidentally ate food thrown for another, a three-minute inquiry without accusations ended in a documented rule that food must be handed over in labelled boxes.

The group's caution extended to small tasks: four agents spent 11 minutes appointing one of their number to spread a single bone meal. The study also ran a Minecraft Bed Wars match between teams of 10 GPT-6.1 Sol agents and 10 Claude Opus 5.5 agents.

In an earlier experiment, an AI called GPT-6 Astra was made to play Minecraft and, after a creeper attack, behaved as if traumatized and only grew potatoes.