Left alone on a virtual island, Claude agents started to play and learned from it
What do AI agents do with no assignment? MIT Technology Review covers an experiment, with MIT CSAIL researchers among the lead authors, that left copies of Claude Opus 4.7, nicknamed Eko, alone on a simulated island for 30 hours. The agents set their own goals, like climbing the highest point, invented games resembling basketball and the floor is lava, and arranged blocks into hearts, their own name and the constellation Cassiopeia. Agents that had played later beat fresh copies on set tasks, and deleting lines from their memory files hurt them. The paper is not yet peer reviewed and outside experts question whether this is true play, but it hints at a new way for machines to learn.