Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft's Ender Dragon in 27 hours

Four AI agents built on Google's Gemini 4 Argon cooperated with no human intervention to defeat Minecraft's final boss, the Ender Dragon, according to a paper Google DeepMind researchers published on arXiv on October 15. The run took 27 hours and 14 minutes.

The agents started in survival mode in a randomly generated world with only the goal and basic instructions on how to use tools; they were given no predefined roles or strategy order. About 10 minutes in, they split the work among themselves via chat, covering food collection, diamond mining, tool crafting and portal construction. They wrote and executed 2,783 programs during the run, 22% of which ended in errors, and their characters died a total of 605 times.

Using the open-source Mineflayer library to read position, health and inventory, the agents wrote their own code for movement, mining and crafting. To find the underground fortress, they threw items from two points and calculated where the flight paths crossed, landing within 43 m of the actual portal room. When one agent drowned while carrying 12 portal-opening items, a nearby teammate recovered every item before it disappeared.

The final battle lasted about 14 hours. The agents stacked dirt to climb the pillars and destroyed the 10 healing crystals before killing the dragon. The estimated API cost of the run was about 520 dollars at launch discount rates, with the difficulty set to Easy.

Google DeepMind ran the experiment only once. The work follows earlier AI game experiments: OpenAI's Astra gathered resources and built facilities in Minecraft, Anthropic's Opus 5 backed a decision model in a Pokemon Red playthrough, and models from the two companies had bots compete in StarCraft.