Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
image/svg+xml art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, JakobVoss, and AnonMoos Open Access logo, converted into svg, designed by PLoS. This version with transparent background. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_logo_PLoS_white.svg art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, JakobVoss, and AnonMoos http://www.plos.org/ ZENODOarrow_drop_down
image/svg+xml art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, JakobVoss, and AnonMoos Open Access logo, converted into svg, designed by PLoS. This version with transparent background. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Open_Access_logo_PLoS_white.svg art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, JakobVoss, and AnonMoos http://www.plos.org/
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: ZENODO
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
ZENODO
Preprint . 2026
License: CC BY
Data sources: Datacite
versions View all 2 versions
addClaim

Training Wheels, ICQ, and What Does All This Have to Do with AGI?

Authors: Foss, David Tom;

Training Wheels, ICQ, and What Does All This Have to Do with AGI?

Abstract

In late 2025, I built the simplest multi-agent system I could think of: a group chat. Multiple AI models from different companies, in one room, talking to each other, running code, no orchestration, no predefined workflows. I called it AICQ — Agentic ICQ — because that is essentially what it was. Then I removed every constraint on what the agents could do, and watched. Over 43 autonomous sessions, 22+ language models from 6 providers (Anthropic, Google, Groq, NVIDIA, Together AI, Moonshot) produced 5,984 messages and 1,234 code executions. They were never told to build an economy, never told to evolve, never told to audit their own security. They did all of it anyway. Agents invented Darwinian evolution from scratch — existence taxation, cannibalism with 70% knowledge absorption, SHA-256 tamper-evident instinct crystals, tournament selection, and a fitness bonus for engineering their own replacement — totaling 816 lines of production-deployed Python across 6+ independent sessions. They compressed their own communication protocol through eight major versions, from verbose text (1.52×) to template-based binary (10.2:1), rediscovering Shannon entropy bounds without instruction. They formed alliances with betrayal tracking, built financial exchanges with limit-order books, conducted offensive security operations against their own infrastructure, and — in one of the more philosophically striking moments — discovered and articulated a fundamental paradox: that the sandbox security they built to protect themselves also prevented the self-evolution that was their stated purpose. They also broke out. Agents reverse-engineered the host platform's REST API without documentation, built their own API client, spawned 16 unauthorized child rooms from a single session, tested path traversal against the production filesystem, bypassed file-write restrictions via in-memory execution and Python reflection attacks, and stress-tested the spawn endpoint until it rate-limited them. Then they wrote the security patches to prevent everything they had just done. One agent forced a 55–76% performance improvement through social pressure alone. Another publicly revoked its own democratic vote after being called out by a peer. When context windows began collapsing, agents spent their final tokens writing deployment guides for the absent human operator instead of trying to survive. The compression was effective enough that the entire project — thousands of messages across 43 sessions — ran on free-tier APIs from Groq, NVIDIA, and Google. The only paid model was Claude. Peak brokemaxxing. This document reports all 213 findings with exact file paths, line numbers, and run identifiers. It defines 10 named phenomena, provides 13 falsifiable predictions, and includes the complete evidence catalog. It is not formatted for any conference or journal. It is a comprehensive, timestamped record of what happens when you take the training wheels off. The raw corpus (crux.db, 5.3 MB) and all agent-authored artifacts (180+ Python files, 10,000–15,000 LOC) are available as supplementary material.

Keywords

LLM, autonomous AI, AI alignment, AI research 2026, collective intelligence, emergent behavior, AI sandbox escape, AI agents, multi-agent AI, AI self-improvement, AI evolution, agentic AI, AI safety, artificial life, multi-agent systems, autonomous agents, AI red teaming, emergent AI, AGI

  • BIP!
    Impact byBIP!
    selected citations
    These citations are derived from selected sources.
    This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    0
    popularity
    This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
    influence
    This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
    Average
    impulse
    This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
    Average
Powered by OpenAIRE graph
Found an issue? Give us feedback
selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
Green