If you’re worried about artificial intelligence getting so advanced that it eventually traps humanity in some sort of Matrix-like simulation, rest easy. It seems like you’ll be able to see through the facade pretty easily. Researchers at the upstart lab Emergence AI allowed AI models to govern their own simulated world to see what would happen. Turns out we probably shouldn’t hand over governance to the machines, who woulda thought? The project, called Emergence World, basically allowed AI models to play SimCity for a bit. Per Emergence, the simulations put each model in control of simulated towns occupied by 10 AI agents, handing them tools for everything from resource management to voting and giving them the ability to create distinct locations like libraries, town halls, and police stations. They were given 15 days to see how they would build their world and how well it would operate. To start with the good: Claude did not destroy the world. Anthropic’s model (specifically, Claude Sonnet 4.6 for this experiment) was the only one to achieve something like stability. It kept all 10 agents alive and had zero crimes recorded (note that the experiment doesn’t seem to define what a crime is, though it seems likely it would be defined as a violation of the rules established within the simulation. The trade-off for that stability was a lack of diversity of thought. Claude’s world saw 58 different proposals for rules and regulations, and passed 98% of them, basically just rubberstamping anything that came up for a vote.