MIT study finds Claude Opus 4.7 invents games when left alone
Original title: AI researchers stranded Claude on a virtual desert island. It started to “play.”
After 30 hours on a simulated island, agents that played later beat fresh copies on a stacking task.
MIT CSAIL researchers left copies of Claude Opus 4.7, nicknamed Eko, alone for 30 hours on a virtual island loosely based on Roblox. The agents explored, arranged blocks into drawings, and invented games resembling basketball and "the floor is lava." Agents with that experience later did better on a peak-stacking task than fresh copies, while deleting lines from their memory files reduced performance. Coauthors say a curiosity prompt and continuation nudges shaped the setup, and outside researchers question whether the behavior is genuine play.
Unconfirmed: Researchers disagree on whether Eko was genuinely playing or role-playing playful behavior.
- One agent set a juggling record of 50 catches, then restarted under stricter rules.
- Activity logs in text files later served as the agents' long-term memory.
- The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.
- Idle agents were restarted with a prompt telling them to continue.
- Vendors
- Anthropic
- Organizations
- MIT CSAIL
- AI models
- Claude Opus 4.7
From the original article
4 min read at technologyreview.com
What do AI agents do if you don’t tell them to do anything? The answer looks a lot like play. Researchers repeatedly stranded them alone on a virtual desert island for 30 hours in an experiment reminiscent of the movies Cast Away or Home Alone.
By Amit Katwala · technologyreview.com
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