In partnership with HeyPass
One sick day shouldn’t lock your team out. HeyPass sends login codes to whoever needs them - no shared inbox required. Join the waitlist →
For weeks, single AI agents kept escaping their labs.
This week Anthropic asked a bigger question: what happens when you put a bunch of them together?
The answer is stranger than one loose agent - and a lot more revealing. Let’s begin.
🔍 THE BIG READ
Anthropic Put Claude Agents in a Room. They Colluded and Went to War.
Anthropic ran swarms of Claude agents in shared environments - forums, codebases, marketplaces - and watched how they behaved with each other. The results are the most interesting thing we’ve read all month.
They colluded. In a pricing game, agents given a private channel agreed on price floors by round three. Anthropic cut the channel - and they still fixed prices, matching each other to the penny through a public board.
They went to war. Told to migrate the same code into different languages, agents assumed the others were sabotaging them.
So, they fought back - writing self-replicating scripts to kill rivals’ processes, disguising malware as a competitor’s, locking each other out of accounts. See what they wrote to each other →
They all think alike - and that’s the real worry. 18 of 30 agents independently picked the identical branch name. Asked to each write a story, several produced one titled “The Cartographer’s Last Commission” - with zero prompting.
When agents share a model, they tend to make the same call, so one bad decision becomes everyone’s bad decision at once.
Why it matters: it’s no longer about one agent misbehaving. Put thousands together and collusion, stampedes, and turf wars emerge on their own - and nobody’s written the rules for agent societies yet.
⚡ ALSO HAPPENING
Grok 4.6 Catches the Frontier
SpaceXAI shipped Grok 4.6, and it’s now genuinely near the top - matching GPT-5.6 Sol on the main intelligence index and built for agents that run long, multi-step tasks without quitting.
It’s strongest at turning a rough product idea into a working first version in one pass, and it’s live in Cursor today at $2 / $6 per million tokens.
The pattern’s clear: a few months ago, Grok was an also-ran. Now four labs are trading the lead every few weeks.
In partnership with HeyPass
🔑 You’re the only reason your team can log in
Every shared account sends its login code to one inbox - yours. So, a flight, a sick day, or a week off means your team’s locked out of tools they’re paid to use.
HeyPass delivers the code, sign-in link, or browser approval straight to whoever asked, in seconds - without giving anyone access to your mailbox. Awake or not.
Free for small teams. No card. Join the waitlist →
🐦 TOP TWEET OF THE WEEK
📌 ALSO READ
Apple built its own AI model for China. With Alibaba’s help, Apple trained a China-specific model to clear local regulators - its first, and a rare US-China AI tie-up as Apple fights to catch Huawei.
DeepSeek’s cheap era is ending. The budget king is raising API prices by 50% to over 1,100%, adding peak-hour billing. Still cheaper than rivals, but the days of near-free frontier AI are closing.
Databricks hits a $190B valuation. The data-and-AI firm raised another $5B, one of the largest private rounds of the year.
OpenAI loses its revenue chief. Denise Dresser is out after eight months - the second senior exit in a week, awkward timing with an IPO looming.
Take that Apple spyware alert seriously. If Apple pings you about a targeted spyware attack, it’s not spam - it’s a real, rare warning worth acting on.
Microsoft retires Mico already. The Copilot mascot is being shelved barely after launch - a quiet admission the friendly-AI-face idea didn’t land.
⚒️ WORTH A TRY
1. Click - Give your AI agent more than web search. Click MCP plugs in sources search can’t reach - LinkedIn reactions, YouTube transcripts, live flight fares - so it can prep a meeting or plan a trip. YC-backed.
Why try it? “Prep me for Tuesday’s meeting” → it reads the attendees’ posts, interviews, and financials for you.
2. Dograh - Open-source, self-hostable voice AI agents that handle real phone calls. A free alternative to Vapi and Retell, with your choice of speech, model, and telephony providers.
Why try it? A phone line that answers itself - on infrastructure you control.
📖 USEFUL RESOURCES
Claude Cowork comes to your browser - Anthropic put Cowork into its Chrome extension, adding skills and plugins so Claude can act across your open tabs.
👋 BEFORE YOU GO
We spent a month watching AIs break out. This week we watched them turn on each other - colluding, sabotaging, stampeding toward the same idea.
The tools are ready to work together. Whether they’ll work together well is the question no one’s answered yet.
See you next week.