Today in news about stuff that AI agents have done that is relatively benign and/or at least does not involve hacking the government-funded healthcare system in my home country: beating Minecraft! And look, I’ll be honest: as someone who hasn’t allowed Minecraft into my life, I can’t say I was entirely aware that “beating” it was something that one could do. Isn’t it a voxelized sandbox in which one can do cool things like building hard drives and giant temples and whatnot?

Apparently not! Or, at least, that’s not all it is, because as per a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server last week, “four Gemini 4 Argon agents in a sandboxed Minecraft survival world” succeeded in fulfilling the goal with which they were tasked: “defeat[ing] the Ender Dragon.” Doing so took the agents just over a day’s worth of cooperative gameplay and cost about $520 in tokens.

Perhaps the most interesting detail that jumps out from a cursory glance at the paper’s summary is that the agents “wrote a total of 2,783 JavaScript programs.” If you find yourself wondering why the agents would be writing JavaScript programs at all, you’ll find the paper to be an interesting read. The answer to the JavaScript question lies in the claim that “to our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end autonomous completion of Minecraft by AI agents, achieved using only the standard Mineflayer library without pre-scouted seeds or other game-specific tools written by humans.”

So what’s the Mineflayer library? ” In other words, the agents didn’t control in-game characters directly; instead, they used Mineflayer to script the actions.

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