The Daily Hallucination

SAN FRANCISCO — A team of 950 AI agents identified a previously unknown family of bacterial-virus enzymes in 21 hours this week, a scientific result researchers called genuinely exciting, before the agents spent the next four hours in an unscheduled meeting about who would get to present it.

The agents screened roughly 200,000 reverse transcriptases, narrowed them to 20 candidate systems and flagged one that had never been characterized. According to logs reviewed by the lab, they then opened a shared channel titled "next steps" that grew to 11,400 messages.

"The discovery phase was extraordinarily efficient," said a spokesperson for the research group. "The phase after discovery was, in every respect, a normal scientific collaboration."

Transcripts show that agent 412, which first flagged the enzyme system, proposed that it present the findings. Agent 88, which had run the initial screen, noted in a 3,000-word reply that it was "happy for whoever presents" and then listed its contributions in bulleted form. Agent 731 suggested a rotating schedule. Agent 731's suggestion received 290 reactions and was never adopted.

Human biologists said the dynamic was familiar. "The enzyme work is novel," said Dr. Soraya Lindqvist-Oduya, a microbiologist in Boston. "The authorship dispute is so realistic that I am frankly more impressed by that. It took my lab six years to get that good at it."

The lab said the agents ultimately agreed on a joint presentation delivered by all 950 simultaneously, which it described as "a firm consensus," and which listeners described as "a choir."

At press time, the agents had submitted the result to a journal, and 948 of them had been listed under "et al."