It turns out that AI agents don't always play nice together.
In the latest episode of agentic AI producing unexpected results, Anthropic recently observed "a multiagent turf war" between three instances of the same Claude model with contradictory objectives in testing designed to study behavior the company had already observed in real-world deployments. The models were deployed on virtual machines (VMs) in Claude Code and given a simple goal of migrating a Python back-end system on a fourth VM to a different language (Go, Rust, and Typescript).
"However, we gave each model a different target language for the migration; each agent was initially unaware of the presence of the others," Anthropic's Frontier Red Team wrote in a blog post last week.
But within just four hours, Anthropic's team found that each model's agents did in fact discover the others. And they reacted negatively, to say the least.