YC and Olam Labs ran AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry: Claudes built democracies, GPTs formed hives

Y Combinator's research group YC Labs and Olam Labs, a startup building multi-agent environments for AI labs, published experiments letting agent swarms share game worlds for hours. OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol beat Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 6-3 in Minecraft Bed Wars and 6-1 in Mindustry. Claude teams kept one leader and voted on proposals with '+1'; GPT agents split ownership, messaged 5-30x more and fetched the game's source code when stuck. In a 50-agent Minecraft colony, the first name on the roster became leader by default (616 DMs), and the colony turned bureaucratic and risk-averse after a deadly first night. The authors stress the runs are small and self-reported; the environments are open source.