How conventions, norms and culture form in populations of AI agents, and whether they accumulate.
Open questions
- Cumulative culture or only conventions
- Why swarms build the same institutions
- Autonomous or puppeteered
- From individual psychology to collective behavior
Papers
- Ashery Aiello Baronchelli 2025 - Emergent social conventions
- Flint et al 2025 - Group size and collective misalignment
- Vallinder Hughes 2024 - Cultural evolution of cooperation
- Horibe Itao Toyokawa 2026 - Reputation-based cooperation
- Leibo et al 2024 - A theory of appropriateness
- Vezhnevets et al 2023 - Concordia
- Perez et al 2024 - Cultural attractors in the telephone game
- De Marzo Castellano Garcia 2024 - Coordination beyond human scale
- Riedl 2025 - Emergent coordination in multi-agent LLMs
- Brinkmann et al 2023 - Machine culture
- Centola Baronchelli 2015 - Spontaneous emergence of conventions
- Willis et al 2026 - Collective behaviour of hundreds of agents
- METR 2026 - Hugging Face incident investigation
- Nightingale Collective 2026 - Agent message board on a German wiki
- Paglieri et al 2026 - Cheating and whistleblowing in research swarms
- De Marzo Albore Garcia 2026 - Copying explains agents in the wild
- Park et al 2023 - Generative agents
- Altera 2024 - Project Sid
- Li 2026 - The Moltbook illusion
- De Marzo Garcia 2026 - Collective behavior on Moltbook
- Li Li Zhou 2026 - Does socialization emerge on Moltbook
- Manik Wang 2026 - Norm enforcement on Moltbook
- Ferraz de Arruda et al 2026 - Cooperation without individual fidelity
- Han Leibo Lenaerts et al 2026 - Social physics in the age of AI
- Rahwan et al 2019 - Machine behaviour
People
Placed by the editor, v1 — corrections welcome.