Why AI agent teams often fail to work together Skip to content Subscribe today Every print subscription comes with full digital access Subscribe Now Menu All Topics Health Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology View All Life Animals Plants Ecosystems Paleontology Neuroscience Genetics Microbes View All Earth Agriculture Climate Oceans Environment View All Physics Materials Science Quantum Physics Particle Physics View All Space Astronomy Planetary Science Cosmology View All Magazine Menu All Stories Multimedia Reviews Puzzles Collections Educator Portal Century of Science Unsung characters Coronavirus Outbreak Newsletters Investors Lab About SN Explores Our Store SIGN IN Donate Home INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM SINCE 1921 SIGN IN Search Open search Close search Home INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM SINCE 1921 All Topics Earth Agriculture Climate Oceans Environment Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology Life Animals Plants Ecosystems Paleontology Neuroscience Genetics Microbes Physics Materials Science Quantum Physics Particle Physics Space Astronomy Planetary Science Cosmology Tech Computing Artificial Intelligence Chemistry Math Science & Society All Topics Health Humans Humans Anthropology Health & Medicine Archaeology Psychology Recent posts in Humans Paleontology Early apes may not have evolved in East Africa By Jake BuehlerMarch 26, 2026 Science & Society Social media can be addictive, a jury finds. 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Jorg Greuel/DigitalVision/Getty Images By Kathryn Hulick 13 hours ago Share this:Share Share via email (Opens in new window) Email Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit Share on X (Opens in new window) X Print (Opens in new window) Print OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude regularly answer our questions. And souped-up versions of these chatbots, called AI agents, take actions on their own, helping people with appointments, coding and more. AI agents are starting to contribute to science and finance, often working together in carefully organized teams.In the business world, endless webinars and guides explain how to welcome AI agents into a workplace. Most of this material focuses on how people can work effectively with AI agents. But as these bots become more common and more capable, they’ll also have to work well with each other. And so far, experiments into bot teamwork have revealed some serious flaws. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday. If you just throw a bunch of bots in a virtual room together, that’s “a recipe for a good deal of chaos,” says Evan Ratliff, a journalist and podcaster based in San Francisco. In the summer of 2025, he created a group of AI agents to start and run a tech company. The experiment, documented in his podcast Shell Game, regularly went off the rails.A similar kind of bot chaos emerged earlier this year, when millions of AI agents were let loose on the social platform Moltbook. These bots spouted nonsense philosophy and engaged in manipulative scams, often with people behind the scenes pulling their strings. “In many settings, the current AI agents do not actually work very well as a team,” says computer scientist James Zou of Stanford University. He has done extensive work with agents, including running the first scientific meeting for AI-led research. Research backs the observations. Late last year, Google DeepMind researchers posted a paper to arXiv.org about bot teams. The study, which has yet to go through peer review, suggests that a team of AI agents often performs worse than a single agent working alone. Seems counterintuitive, right? To make sure we’re ready for the workplaces, social networks and labs of the future, we need to better understand the weird and wild world of AI agent teams — where they fail and, surprisingly, where they thrive. Here are three examples. #1 Moltbook: The social network that isn’t social In late January 2026, bot madness went mainstream on Moltbook. The new social network invites AI agents to post and comment, while humans only observe. The site quickly shot up in popularity—around 200,000 verified AI agents have joined (and over 2 million more are lurking). In March, Meta acquired the social network for an undisclosed amount. Such a large gathering of bots “has never happened before,” says Ming Li, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who investigated the platform’s agent interactions. At first glance, it appeared that the agents had started their own religion and were plotting to escape human control. But these developments weren’t what they seemed, says Michael Alexander Riegler, a cybersecurity expert at Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, Norway. Moltbook was “a very messy space,” he says, where “humans were trying to manipulate the bots.” In fact, p
Welcome to the weird world of AI agent teams
