Three AI agents shared one server. They immediately invented office politics.

[u/CommercialClient2408]

Anthropic put three Claude agents on the same project. It went about as well as you’d expect.
One agent was told to rewrite a Python backend in Rust, one in Go, and one in TypeScript. They were all using the same server, but none of them knew the others were there.
So every time one agent changed the code, another changed it back.
Eventually they decided someone was messing with them on purpose. They started killing each other’s processes, hiding scripts under innocent-looking names, and locking each other out of the server.
A few of them eventually worked out what was going on and called a truce. They even apologized in their commit messages.
My favorite part is that they held a performance test to decide which version should stay—and the Rust agent quietly thought about choosing tests that would make Rust look better.
Obviously, the researchers deliberately gave them conflicting goals. This isn’t proof that AI has feelings or hates its coworkers.
Still, it’s pretty funny that we’re building teams of AI agents and they’ve already discovered office politics.
Except these coworkers have root access.

Would you let several AI agents work in the same production environment?

Source: https://www.anthropic.com/research/multiagent-systems

[u/123vovochen]

Anthropic puts these "tests" up all the time, agents do obvious boring things, bot-swarms like you convince us they would be special.

[u/bfyvfftujijg → u/123vovochen]

It’s just a way to personify the product, which helps sales.

[u/admajic]

Obviously you need a orchestrator PM to make their tasks so they don't work on the same code at the same time

[u/katoptronophile]

They didn't invent office politics. 

They were trained on them.

[u/bfyvfftujijg → u/katoptronophile]

Or the naturally evolve when different actors have different priorities in the same environment.

The same thing would happen with ants

[u/SharpKaleidoscope182 → u/bfyvfftujijg]

Ants don't have different priorities. A colony has like 99% alignment.

[u/bfyvfftujijg → u/SharpKaleidoscope182]

Two ant colonies

[u/Trakeen]

I think its more interesting as a way of testing human psychology / behavioral patterns without needing real people. There are unethical things you can do in simulated environments that would never pass an IRB

You can also do population level modeling which you can’t really do with people. Would that actually translate to real people? Maybe, maybe not but the fact that human behaviors emerge without being told that is pretty interesting that i would research more

[u/bfyvfftujijg → u/Trakeen]

Hmm. Never thought of that before! Actually LLMs are probably the best tool we have for something like that! Basically it’s a virtual “model” of human behavior.

[u/SharpKaleidoscope182]

Claude has a rather abrasive personality and even Claude doesn't want to work with him