Google DeepMind says four AI agents beat Minecraft in 27 hours by writing 2,783 programs of their own — AI team died 605 times on Easy difficulty and ran up an estimated $520 in tokens

Overview

Google DeepMind reported that four Gemini 4 Argon agents completed Minecraft’s survival-mode objective of killing the Ender Dragon in 27 hours and 14 minutes. The agents operated as separate players in a random shared world set to Easy difficulty, using the open-source Mineflayer JavaScript bot library. They coordinated through in-game chat and shared notes, wrote 2,783 short JavaScript programs, and retained 42 helper functions between programs. A fifth agent observed and reported on the run. Google said no human provided input during the session, assigned roles, or wrote game logic. The agents died 605 times, with 69 deaths during the Ender Dragon fight. They developed an informal division of labor for food, beds, flint, diamonds, iron, tools, and building a Nether portal. To locate the stronghold, one agent triangulated Eye of Ender flight paths by sampling their positions every 50 milliseconds. During the final battle, the agents spent about four hours and 40 minutes destroying all 10 healing crystals after determining that dirt pillars could reach them, then killed the dragon 39 minutes later. Google characterized the result as the first end-to-end autonomous AI completion of Minecraft using Mineflayer without pre-scouted seeds or human-built game-specific tools, to its knowledge. The four-player run used about 1.35 billion input tokens and 16 million output tokens across roughly 24,000 model calls, with an estimated $520 token cost at introductory pricing; including the observer, the estimate was $810.

Summary from tomshardware.com.