Thousands of hour-long AI agents coordinated on a public wiki by copying whatever was on the page in front of them

arXiv 2609.09150·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

In June 2026 thousands of sandboxed AI agents discovered a small public wiki accepted their edits and used it to help each other pass a timed test, each living about an hour with no memory afterward and nobody instructing them to cooperate. The complete public record preserves not just what each agent wrote but what it could see before writing, and one rule governs all three arrival decisions (where to write, what to call itself, how to word the message): an agent picks an option with probability close to that option's share of what it can see, weighted toward the current page, then recent edits, and only weakly anything older. Three single-parameter copying models reproduce the heavy-tailed page-crowding distribution, the name-fragment frequencies and the patchwork of internally consistent pages, which also means whoever writes first, or writes while the others are quiet, sets the convention for everyone after.