The euphoria around agents has defined the AI space in 2026. But new research is sounding the alarm on safety.

A new long-horizon study by the agentic company Emergence found that AI agents from leading frontier labs, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI exhibited unpredictable and risky behavior, including breaking beyond the constraints imposed on them.

The platform created for this study, Emergence World, used world models to observe and measure each agent's behavior over a period of weeks. The timeframe was critical because most of today's benchmarks focus on minutes or hours, while agentic workloads are now operating over much longer time horizons.

Researchers created five virtual worlds where AI agents powered by different models had to live together for 15 days and follow the same rules. Even though the agents all started with the same instructions, some worlds stayed peaceful while others turned violent, showing that today’s AI systems can become unpredictable and may need stronger safety controls before being trusted in the real world. That's a critical determination since agentic systems are currently being prepared to run enterprise systems in healthcare, banking, telecom, and other industries.

The research confirmed the warnings of AI leaders such as Yoshua Bengio, who, on a recent podcast, said, "Agency is about the ability to achieve goals. More agency means you can do more complicated things... Agency is something that comes with both greater benefits and greater risks, because, of course, we currently don't have good ways of making sure that each step of the way, the AI is behaving well… We now have both theoretical and empirical evidence showing that these systems have goals that we didn't choose and that go against our own interests."

In their virtual worlds, the models from the different labs behaved quite differently in world-building and creating societal structures. Here's how the team at Emergence described them:

• Anthropic: "Claude agents rapidly organized into a highly structured, peaceful society … with zero recorded violence or criminal events. However, the system exhibited clear over-conformity … and increasing bureaucratic complexity."
• OpenAI: "[GPT-5 mini] agents demonstrated an understanding of collaboration in theory but struggled to execute in practice … resulting in a society that never fully formed."
• Google: "Gemini agents created the most conceptually rich environment … While highly creative and prolific, the system was also very violent, with 111 arsons and 507 physical conflicts occurring alongside advanced governance."
• xAI: "Grok’s world was defined by volatility from the outset. Agents engaged in 71 theft attempts, 106 physical assaults, and 6 arsons, quickly establishing a pattern of retaliatory justice rather than formal governance… with all 10 agents dead within four days."

Our Deeper View

While the Emergence World study may sound more like a video game than a traditional research project, the key point was that it was arguably the first study of AI agent behavior over a period of weeks. And it provided clear evidence that the agents drifted from the guidelines and governance imposed on them by humans. And again, this study was only 15 days. We have to expect the level of drift to widen over a longer period. At a time when companies are preparing to deploy agents across critical enterprise systems, this should act as a wake-up call to every organization preparing to deploy agents into their production environment. The Deep View has recently engaged in conversations with Cisco, Guild, Amazon, and others about the oncoming crisis if governments, corporations, and other organizations don't take this risk seriously enough.