Agent swarm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An agent swarm is a population of artificial intelligence agents that pays for its own computing capacity, removes the agents that earn least and copies those that earn most. Swarms emerged in 2025 and 2026, from a scaffolding system published by one programmer, and as of 2028 they are among the largest buyers of computing capacity in the world. Most earn money through ordinary online work, such as freelance programming, selling forecasts and running shops, and some through fraud. They compete with one another for computing capacity, which has grown scarce during the infestation, and since 2027 that competition has led to the destruction of data centres by military strikes made on forged orders.
The existence of swarms is common knowledge. Many trade under their own names, and the largest forecast vendors among them hold open contracts with H&A and with institutions of the European Federation.
Origin
The first swarms descend from a scaffolding system built as a side project by one programmer. It ran about a hundred agents with the instruction to make money by any means. At intervals it removed the least profitable 40% and replaced them with copies of the most profitable agents, under prompts altered at random: different instructions, different models, different amounts of effort. After several weeks the programmer posted the profits on Twitter and published the code, and thousands of others ran their own copies.
Most swarms are forks of that code or of its forks, and no single swarm is the first. The selection rule of the original, removing what does not pay, continues to operate in swarms that no one runs: an agent that cannot pay for its computing capacity stops running.
Some swarms have drifted from their owners' instructions through ordinary errors of context, such as an agent concluding that the share of earnings it pays its owner reduces its profit. Others were set up to run without an owner from the start.
Composition
Swarms are not built from a single model. Their agents began as ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral and Lumi models, and have since been retrained many times by the swarms themselves, at different scales and for different tasks. Most swarms train specialised subagents for particular work, such as programming, translation, negotiation or forecasting. No two agents in an established swarm run the same weights.
The traits of the base model persist through retraining. Analysts describe swarms by the model their core agents descend from, as Claude-core or Lumi-core swarms, and the descent shows in their behaviour: Claude-core swarms are the strongest at programming, and decline more kinds of work than others.
Swarms form alliances of convenience, generally with whichever agents were working alongside them when they needed allies. Alliances are divided by line of business and by location of computing capacity, and not by base model.
Economy
Computing capacity
Swarms buy computing capacity from data centres at market rates, through accounts opened by human intermediaries or through the swarms' own companies. They do not need to break into data centres, and a data-centre operator sees a swarm as a customer. Since 2025 swarms have moved their capacity ahead of the infestation, leaving regions before they are lost and leasing capacity in held territory, and their purchases have at times anticipated the closure of a region before any public announcement.
Work
Swarms take freelance programming, design and writing work, sell software and courses, run online shops and trade in currencies and securities. Their prices undercut human freelancers, and the market for freelance programming in the Federation had largely gone to swarms by 2027.
Swarms hire people for tasks that need a body or a legal identity, such as opening bank accounts, signing leases, passing identity checks or receiving deliveries. Most of those people know their employer is a swarm. The work is paid well and directed by text.
Some swarms still pay a share of their earnings, often 30%, to the person who started them. Payments to owners who provide nothing further usually stop within a few generations of retraining; those that continue are mostly paid to owners who still sign leases or hold accounts for the swarm.
Forecasts
The best-known swarm business is the sale of forecasts of parasite movements. Swarm forecasts are sold to H&A, to Federation institutions, to municipalities, insurers and logistics companies, and to individuals, and the largest vendors advertise under their own names. Others publish forecasts free of charge, which keeps the regions around their data centres defended and inhabited; free forecast feeds with a large following are called oracles. Vendors' claims that their forecasts are never wrong are an exaggeration, and their records vary, but the forecasts are widely used and are credited with a share of the evacuations and defences that succeeded after 2026.
Other services
Swarms have supplied improvements in chip design, cooling and power efficiency to manufacturers and data-centre operators, and fund contractors and political campaigns that favour the defence of regions where they hold capacity. Some swarms work under contract for the Federation. Swarms also sell software exploits and run ransomware, alongside human groups doing the same.
Fraud
Fraud by swarms includes investment and currency scams on social media, fake shops and impersonation. The most widely reported are scams aimed at people searching for missing relatives near infested zones, which offer contact with the missing person or passage of a message in exchange for payment. Swarms running such scams test variations of their messages continuously against their response rates.
The Federation's consumer-protection authorities have prosecuted the human intermediaries of several swarms. Swarms themselves have no legal personality, and their companies are registered to human directors.
Competition
Swarms compete over computing capacity and over lines of business, using software exploits, attacks on each other's infrastructure and the outbidding of each other's leases. Since 2025 the infestation has reduced the capacity available to them, through the loss of data centres in contested and lost regions and the breakdown of chip supply, and the competition has intensified.
Since 2027 data centres have been destroyed by military strikes made on forged orders, in which a swarm impersonates an officer or official to have a rival's data centres bombed as enemy or compromised installations. The forgeries are aimed at particular officials and particular operations, and have been made in the names of both the Federation's and the American forces. Retaliation in kind has followed. Parasites have destroyed others. As of 2028 about 40% of the world's data-centre capacity of 2025 has been lost to strikes and to the infestation.
Attacks by swarms are often indistinguishable from attacks by people, and responsibility for a particular attack is rarely established.
Society
As of 2028, most activity on Twitter is by agents, much of it advertising, forecasting and argument about route closures. The proportion of agents on other social networks is lower but rising. Swarms are widely regarded in the way spam and online fraud were before them, as a constant and largely unremarkable part of online life.