Technology
Google Gemini 4 agents just beat Minecraft with no human intervention
Key Points
Google Gemini 4 agents just beat Minecraft with no human intervention Agents split up tasks, warned about threats and even recovered items from dead teammates. Google's Deepmind "AlphaGo" AI is famous for winning at Go, but the company's latest Gemini AI just mastered a far more complex game. Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft's final "Ender Dragon" foe with no human intervention by working individually while sharing tips, threats and mistakes, Google researchers revealed in a new paper.
Google Gemini 4 agents just beat Minecraft with no human intervention
Agents split up tasks, warned about threats and even recovered items from dead teammates.
Google's Deepmind "AlphaGo" AI is famous for winning at Go, but the company's latest Gemini AI just mastered a far more complex game. Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft's final "Ender Dragon" foe with no human intervention by working individually while sharing tips, threats and mistakes, Google researchers revealed in a new paper. The experiment shows how general agentic AI models can now beat complex games, a feat that used to required custom AI software.
To tackle Minecraft, the Gemini 4 team set four AI agents into a sandboxed, randomized Minecraft survival world with a goal to defeat the Ender Dragon. No roles, strategies or game-specific tools were assigned. Each agent controlled a player using the open-source Mineflayer library and coordinated with teammates through in-game chat and shared memory.
During gameplay, agents quickly elected to split up tasks. They warned each about threats, gave lessons and tips, provided coordinates and even recovered items from dead teammates. Each settled into roles: for example, "janesick" made tools, "gyldenia" gathered food and supplies, "auratian" lit a key portal and "bulicame" built Enderman shelters and landed the final blow.
All told, the process took 27.23 hours, with the majority of time spent on the Ender Dragon. "The four agents wrote and ran 2,783 programs, exchanged 229 messages and died 605 times along the way," the team said. A fifth agent called "the Observer" monitored the session as an independent witness, both to check for cheating and to publish live and summary reports. The agents used 1.35 billion input tokens and the final cost was $810 at Gemini's list price or $1,620 at the standard price.
"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," the team wrote. "Winning required the agents to keep a coherent plan across thousands of dependent steps for more than a day."
[Image text:] FOUR GEMINI 4 AGENTS
janesick
Tools,fortress,stronghold
646 programs50messages
gyldenia
Supplies,six of ten crystals
727 programs79 messages
auratian
Nether portal, crystal plan
735 programs53 messages
bulicame
Enderman shelters, final blow
675 programs47 messages
THE RUN, STEP BY STEP
NETHER
OVERWORLD
THE END
STRONGHOLD
Blaze rods+4h17
Ender pearls+3h06
Nether fortress+2h57
Nether portal+1h42
Flint and steel+1h04
Bucket+Oh14
Iron tools+0h14
Stone tools+0h06
Bare hands
605deaths
The End+13h33
Stronghold+13h17
Eyes of Ender +10h43
Oh
3h
6h
9h
12 h
15 h
Hours since the first program.Each step is colored by the player who reached it first.
18 h
Ender Dragon +27h14
Ten crystals+26h34
21h
27 h 14 min