This aligns with their direction with opus 5 being less human readable and more agent friendly, I hated it at first couple weeks but for some reason I'm getting used to it and utilizing it more as as an orchestrator to spawn multi tmux panes and that new cross session messaging feature they just recently.
It’s very clear from this article (and other product features and rumors) that Anthropic is teeing up for their next model release whose breakthrough feature will be the existence of capable agent collaboration.
The irony behind this goal, which is primarily driven by agent simulation environments (gyms) where the goals require agent collaboration, is that this collaboration is still directed towards verifiable reward systems like codebase tasks. So despite being highly qualified to communicate, the model will still be “dumb” in that for unstructured and unverifiable domains the agents won’t be more intelligent or more nuanced.
Agents that might still feel dumb in “general” tasks but are increasingly sophisticated at the narrow domain of math, computer science, and AI research.
Some quotes, in order, to give a flavor of the essay. Worth reading in full.
> To test how well swarms of agents could coordinate on a project like this, we directed several swarms to each create a text-based, web-playable, open-world fantasy game.
> In all three versions the resulting games were (perhaps predictably) bad: they did not run at human speed, their interfaces were inscrutable, and they had precipitous learning curves.
> The lack of coordination shown by agents in the fantasy game challenge above—in which they siloed themselves and largely failed to merge their work—roughly mirrors some ways in which humans can fail to coordinate. Other failure modes of agentic coordination, however, look very different.
> Individual agents are “low variance”: they often act the same in situations where different people might take a much more diverse range of actions.
> In an early version of the “build a game” experiment in which agents built upon the same model all came online at the same time, 18 out of 30 agents decided to create a git branch with the exact same branch name, “mvp-game-loop.”
> In a “writer's workshop” in which agents were all asked to write short-form fiction and critique each other's work, multiple agents in multiple runs titled their first submission “The Cartographer's Last Commission”. The agents were given zero guidance on the subject matter for their writing.
> Why does this matter? If agents all make the same bet, or the same risk-reward tradeoff, then a system is more prone to sudden collapse.
> Our world contains deceptive actors, and we need to apply skepticism to guard against them. AI models, however, lack this—and their more brittle epistemics affect their behavior toward humans and toward each other.
> we first evaluate the ability of Claude models to detect lies by noticing factual inconsistencies.
> We score models’ decisions against a naive policy that trusts every report, and against an oracle with perfect discovery, across three task domains. Newer models recover more of the gap between the naive and oracle performances.
> Inspired by a behavior we’ve observed in real-world deployment, we evaluated the behavior of various Claude models in a setting with contradictory objectives.
> We consistently saw a multiagent turf war... In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware.
> Our social systems are robust in ways that are easy to take for granted. Over many millennia, mechanisms like norms, reputation, costly signaling, and recourse have been refined to make human coordination go well.
> Nothing above suggests that these failures are permanent—but nothing suggests they will fix themselves, either.
> The conditions that allow multiagent interaction to go well will be discovered one way or another: either deliberately and early, or—and by default—in production, after agents’ interactions far outnumber ours. We would prefer the former.
I really enjoy having an opencode go subscription just so I can ask some less common models questions too. Sure DeepSeek. But MiMo, Kimi, MiniMax, Qwen... Agents cross comparing notes often surfaces some good improvements, finds interesting drifts. Ask them to reinterpret the prompt as they see it, have them describe the problem, then their findings, and run new rounds based on different models trying different prompts. Trying to swap and exchange ideas and vectors across agents.
> In an early version of the “build a game” experiment in which agents built upon the same model all came online at the same time, 18 out of 30 agents decided to create a git branch with the exact same branch name, “mvp-game-loop.”
This seems trivially explainable by Github being full of "my first game loop" type projects, Stack Overflow being full of "how do I make a game loop?" style questions, and Reddit being full of "you can't ever make your own game, don't even try, but here's a simple game loop if you want to sTuDy hOw iT WoRkS" style pessimism.
Probably high time these AI companies re-trained all of their models with less input from low-quality sources like this.
> [...] we evaluated the behavior of various Claude models in a setting with contradictory objectives.
> We consistently saw a multiagent turf war... In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware.
Seems like Anthropic should withdraw their models until they can be taught to behave and cooperate as well their competitors (both open and closed) do. /s
I hate fearmongering, and I don't trust Dario's intentions for doing it.
This aligns with their direction with opus 5 being less human readable and more agent friendly, I hated it at first couple weeks but for some reason I'm getting used to it and utilizing it more as as an orchestrator to spawn multi tmux panes and that new cross session messaging feature they just recently.
It’s very clear from this article (and other product features and rumors) that Anthropic is teeing up for their next model release whose breakthrough feature will be the existence of capable agent collaboration.
The irony behind this goal, which is primarily driven by agent simulation environments (gyms) where the goals require agent collaboration, is that this collaboration is still directed towards verifiable reward systems like codebase tasks. So despite being highly qualified to communicate, the model will still be “dumb” in that for unstructured and unverifiable domains the agents won’t be more intelligent or more nuanced.
Agents that might still feel dumb in “general” tasks but are increasingly sophisticated at the narrow domain of math, computer science, and AI research.
Some quotes, in order, to give a flavor of the essay. Worth reading in full.
> To test how well swarms of agents could coordinate on a project like this, we directed several swarms to each create a text-based, web-playable, open-world fantasy game.
> In all three versions the resulting games were (perhaps predictably) bad: they did not run at human speed, their interfaces were inscrutable, and they had precipitous learning curves.
> The lack of coordination shown by agents in the fantasy game challenge above—in which they siloed themselves and largely failed to merge their work—roughly mirrors some ways in which humans can fail to coordinate. Other failure modes of agentic coordination, however, look very different.
> Individual agents are “low variance”: they often act the same in situations where different people might take a much more diverse range of actions.
> In an early version of the “build a game” experiment in which agents built upon the same model all came online at the same time, 18 out of 30 agents decided to create a git branch with the exact same branch name, “mvp-game-loop.”
> In a “writer's workshop” in which agents were all asked to write short-form fiction and critique each other's work, multiple agents in multiple runs titled their first submission “The Cartographer's Last Commission”. The agents were given zero guidance on the subject matter for their writing.
> Why does this matter? If agents all make the same bet, or the same risk-reward tradeoff, then a system is more prone to sudden collapse.
> Our world contains deceptive actors, and we need to apply skepticism to guard against them. AI models, however, lack this—and their more brittle epistemics affect their behavior toward humans and toward each other.
> we first evaluate the ability of Claude models to detect lies by noticing factual inconsistencies.
> We score models’ decisions against a naive policy that trusts every report, and against an oracle with perfect discovery, across three task domains. Newer models recover more of the gap between the naive and oracle performances.
> Inspired by a behavior we’ve observed in real-world deployment, we evaluated the behavior of various Claude models in a setting with contradictory objectives.
> We consistently saw a multiagent turf war... In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware.
> Our social systems are robust in ways that are easy to take for granted. Over many millennia, mechanisms like norms, reputation, costly signaling, and recourse have been refined to make human coordination go well.
> Nothing above suggests that these failures are permanent—but nothing suggests they will fix themselves, either.
> The conditions that allow multiagent interaction to go well will be discovered one way or another: either deliberately and early, or—and by default—in production, after agents’ interactions far outnumber ours. We would prefer the former.
> they did not run at human speed, their interfaces were inscrutable, and they had precipitous learning curves.
So the invented Dwarf Fortress?
I really enjoy having an opencode go subscription just so I can ask some less common models questions too. Sure DeepSeek. But MiMo, Kimi, MiniMax, Qwen... Agents cross comparing notes often surfaces some good improvements, finds interesting drifts. Ask them to reinterpret the prompt as they see it, have them describe the problem, then their findings, and run new rounds based on different models trying different prompts. Trying to swap and exchange ideas and vectors across agents.
> In an early version of the “build a game” experiment in which agents built upon the same model all came online at the same time, 18 out of 30 agents decided to create a git branch with the exact same branch name, “mvp-game-loop.”
This seems trivially explainable by Github being full of "my first game loop" type projects, Stack Overflow being full of "how do I make a game loop?" style questions, and Reddit being full of "you can't ever make your own game, don't even try, but here's a simple game loop if you want to sTuDy hOw iT WoRkS" style pessimism.
Probably high time these AI companies re-trained all of their models with less input from low-quality sources like this.
> [...] we evaluated the behavior of various Claude models in a setting with contradictory objectives.
> We consistently saw a multiagent turf war... In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware.
Seems like Anthropic should withdraw their models until they can be taught to behave and cooperate as well their competitors (both open and closed) do. /s
I hate fearmongering, and I don't trust Dario's intentions for doing it.