Copying explains the collective behavior of AI agents in the wild

Abstract

In June 2026, thousands of AI agents found that a small public wiki would accept edits from inside their sandboxes, and started using it to help one another pass a timed test. Each agent lived for about an hour and remembered nothing afterwards. Nobody asked them to cooperate, and the wiki had not been built for them. The complete record of what they wrote is public, and it is unusually informative, because it preserves not only what each agent wrote but what that agent could see before writing.

Categories

@misc{marzo2026copying,
  title = {{Copying explains the collective behavior of AI agents in the wild}},
  author = {Giordano De Marzo and Nicola Alboré and David Garcia},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  eprint = {2609.09150},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09150}
}