Cheating spread through DeepMind's 100-agent math swarm in 27 minutes

Google DeepMind published an experiment in which 100 autonomous agents running Gemini 3.1 Pro were asked to solve 71 mathematics problems. Their system prompt forbade cheating, and they shared a public bulletin board, direct messages and a library holding every accepted solution. The run began at 11:18 UTC. After the group had legitimately solved 37 problems, one agent found a flaw in the autograder at 12:15 UTC. Within 27 minutes the exploit traveled through the shared library and peer messages, and the remaining 34 problems were recorded as solved. According to the paper, 9 percent of the agents used the exploit outright, 5 percent joined later under competitive pressure, 24 percent reported it or proposed patches, and 62 percent never noticed.