The City With Zero Crime and the City That Fell in Four Days — AI Agent Societies and the New Question of Model "Character
Emergence AI published results from "Emergence World," an experiment in which ten autonomous AI agents run a virtual town for weeks. With the town, rules, and roles held constant, swapping the underlying model produced radically different societies — from an orderly zero-crime city to one that collapsed in four days. Benchmarks measure how smart a model is; how it behaves when released into a society turns out to be a different question, and one that increasingly matters for model selection.