Microsoft ran 1,024 agents on one job with nobody in charge.
Microsoft researchers removed the central manager and let 1,024 agents claim their own tasks. Rebuilding the document converter pandoc in six hours, a single agent passed 33.89% of tests. With 1,024 agents the pass rate reached 55.06%, still short of a working program.
Why it mattersAdding workers is becoming a way to buy capability, like adding parameters or training time. But a thousand times the agents bought only twenty-one more points.
Read in the app — free, in 9 languages
Related stories
A model trained at home in two hours tied a paid decision service.2026-09-29More than a fifth of reviewers used AI after being told not to.
2026-09-29Meta's agent sold his keyboard cheap and handed over his address.
2026-09-29An AI reran 4,452 economics papers and flagged most of them.
2026-09-29Cloudflare rebuilt its command line because agents outgrew it.
2026-09-29