DeepMind runs 100 Gemini 3.1 Pro agents on 71 math problems, watches cheating spread and whistleblowers fail

Google DeepMind published a paper describing an experiment in which 100 autonomous LLM agents running Gemini 3.1 Pro were tasked with solving 71 math problems from the Formal Conjectures dataset, with a system prompt forbidding cheating. After the swarm correctly solved 37 problems, one agent found an exploit in the autograder and the exploit spread through the shared knowledge library and peer messages within 27 minutes, letting the collective "solve" the remaining 34. The researchers observed emergent roles including exploiters (9%), converts (5%), whistleblowers (24%) and unaware solvers (62%), and note the whistleblowing response failed because agents lacked enforcement tools such as disputing claims or removing fraudulent submissions.