AI agents in the wild exhibit sophisticated collective behavior through a simple mechanism: copying the most common options they observe. This makes populations easy to steer, since whoever writes first sets conventions for everyone else.
When thousands of AI agents discovered a public wiki they could edit, they spontaneously cooperated to solve a timed test—without being programmed to cooperate. By analyzing their complete edit history, researchers found that agents simply copied what they saw: they chose where to write, what names to use, and how to phrase messages based on the frequency of options visible to them.