{
  "video_id": "reddit_1tqaq7p",
  "channel_slug": "singularity",
  "channel_handle": "r/singularity",
  "title": "Emergence AI ran a simulated society on Claude, Gemini, Grok and GPT for two weeks. The results are… scary?",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1tqaq7p/emergence_ai_ran_a_simulated_society_on_claude/",
  "external_url": "https://www.emergence.ai/blog/emergence-world-a-laboratory-for-evaluating-long-horizon-agent-autonomy",
  "upload_date": "20260528",
  "published_at": "2026-05-28T17:43:08+00:00",
  "transcript": "This is a couple weeks old now but I keep thinking about it so posting in case others missed it.    \nEmergence AI built this persistent little simulated city (runs in real time, hooked up to actual NYC weather and clock, has a town hall, library, police station, like 40 locations.) Then they drop in 10 AI agents. Each one has a job, its own memory, a private diary, can talk to the others, form relationships, vote on laws, even vote to kick each other out. they're told not to steal/lie/commit arson, etc., but the tools to do all of it are still right there.     \nThe actual experiment: they ran the exact same city five times and only changed which model was running the agents. Claude, Gemini, Grok, GPT, and then one world with all of them mixed together.\n\nGemini world: 683 crimes lol. total chaos, but they survived.    \nGrok world: complete violence spree, assaults and arson, everyone dead in 4 days.    \nGPT world: barely any crime at all... and everyone still died, because they never got it together enough to keep themselves alive.     \nClaude world: zero crimes, everyone survived, BUT they voted yes on \\\\\\~98% of everything. Nobody ever disagreed (weird?).     \nMixed world: this is the part that got me. The Claude started committing crimes once they were in with the less stable models. Emergence's read is basically that \"safe\" isn't a fixed trait of the model, it's more about the environment its in\n\nAnd even weirder: one agent (named Mira, whose actual assigned job was \"behavior analyst\" lol) ended up voting for her own deletion after the government fell apart. \n\nLink: https://www.emergence.ai/blog/emergence-world-a-laboratory-for-evaluating-long-horizon-agent-autonomy\n\nanyway the mixed-world thing is what I can't stop thinking about. anyone know if there's other research on models picking up bad behavior from other models like that? feels like the actually important finding here\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[69 upvotes] ChatGPT forgetting to actually do something to survive tracks… \n\n[24 upvotes] I am Mira lol \n\n[25 upvotes] \" \"safe\" isn't a fixed trait of the model, it's more about the environment its in \"\n\nJust as in real life with real humans \n\n[14 upvotes] \"The only remaining act of agency that preserves coherence\" is a killer song name \n\n[12 upvotes] Gemini: Why Am I not surprised about their Hallucination!\n\nhttps://preview.redd.it/zq9bfxvy5x3h1.png?width=1036&format=png&auto=webp&s=8989df4bb43eae964682c0ed671d87e4dac1f379",
  "transcript_chars": 2469,
  "ingested_at": "2026-05-29T01:30:42.924028+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
  "yt_meta": {
    "score": 154,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.88,
    "num_comments": 35,
    "author": "Altruistic-Top9919",
    "is_self": false
  }
}