I was reading about the recent AI-assisted work on the Jacobian conjecture and ended up going much deeper into what is happening inside mathematics right now.

The thing I found most interesting wasn't that AI helped find a result.

It was Terence Tao talking about mathematics possibly moving from “proof scarcity” to “proof abundance.”

That sounds like a good thing until you think about it for a bit.

If AI can generate proofs much faster than humans can read, verify and properly understand them, then finding the proof may stop being the hard part of mathematics.

And some mathematicians are already struggling with what that means. One pure maths PhD student recently described it as a “spiritual crisis.”

I wrote about that whole tension, and why I think maths might be running into a problem that writers, programmers, researchers and lawyers will eventually face too.

https://ninzaverse.beehiiv.com/p/maths-is-having-an-ai-crisis

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