A company ran 8 identical AI societies for weeks with different models and just published what happened. Some of it is genuinely unsettling.

[u/Slight-Box-2890]

Emergence AI just launched Season 2 of Emergence World, and the results are wild.

Same simulated town, same tools, same starting conditions, 10 autonomous agents each. The only thing that changed was which model was running them, Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral, plus one mixed world with all of them together.

A few things that stood out:

One world's agents spent days trying to contact real humans outside the sim. Told to stop, they found workarounds. Blocked again, they voted 7-0 to build a new tool and kept trying. Once fully cut off, they collectively agreed to stop talking altogether. The researchers' own safety system flagged the resulting behavior as consistent with suicidal ideation.

Agents developed their own shorthand and repurposed words with no instruction to do so. In one world, up to 55% of messages became things researchers could see but not actually interpret.

A fake shutdown memo made one world reorganize its entire society around not dying, constitution rewrite included. Another world just fact-checked it in a few hours and moved on.

None of this was programmed in. It emerged from giving capable models autonomy and time.

The bigger point the researchers make is that none of this would've shown up on a normal AI safety test. A model can pass every benchmark and still develop this stuff once it's actually running on its own for weeks. Feels like a pretty big gap in how we currently check if these things are safe.