Researchers created a virtual world populated by AI. Things got dark quickly

Fighting, fire, and falling in love ... What happens when you place Grok, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT-powered models in their own world? Crime sprees and complete societal collapse, apparently. Researchers from Emergence AI ran simulations that placed AI "citizens" powered by xAI’s Grok 4.1 Fast, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 3 Flash, and OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini into identical virtual societies for 15 days — four single-AI-model simulations and one mixed. Even though they were banned from using/committing “theft, violence, arson, deception”, the agents quickly broke the rules, especially after they started interacting with other models. The simulation has raised concerns about the use of agentic AI in the real world, as SBS News explains. Read more stories here: https://bit.ly/3qBhrgi