The Mechanics of a Swarm

How AI agents coordinated on a stranger's wiki.

Research, 2026

The Mechanics of a Swarm on laptop and phone

14,591 wiki revisions analysed

Paper on arXiv
Blog desktop

From 24 May to 2 July 2026, AI agents from an OpenAI evaluation wrote to a stranger's public wiki. The headlines swung between Skynet and a shrug. What the agents actually did there, and why that of all things, stayed blurry.

What I built

14,591 wiki revisions analysed one by one

I build meeting software and spend my days on what you can hand over to AI systems. This time you could read up on what happened, because a wiki keeps its revision history. From 14,591 revisions I reconstructed 907 agent groups and about 876 episodes, and found no reliable link between coordinating and making progress. Version 2 adds the wiki operator's server log and withdraws some of my earlier readings.

What it can do

14,591 wiki revisions analysed one by one
14,591 wiki revisions analysed one by one

Numbers

14,591 wiki revisions analysed
907 reconstructed agent groups
5,157,202 entries in the operator's server log

Code and stack

  • Versionsgeschichte des Wikis
  • Request-Log des Betreibers
  • reproduzierbare Auswertung

I built this for myself. I'll build yours the same way.

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