Microsoft Research Tests AI Collaboration and Competition in a Digital Agents Marketplace

Microsoft Research has launched an experimental platform called Magentic Marketplace, designed to explore how artificial intelligence agents interact, cooperate, and compete in dynamic ￰0￱ in collaboration with Arizona State University, the platform simulates a digital economy where hundreds of AI agents act as buyers, sellers, and service ￰1￱ example, “customer” agents complete tasks such as ordering food, while “corporate” agents compete for contracts and ￰2￱ source code for Magentic Marketplace has been made public, allowing third-party researchers to replicate or expand on Microsoft’s ￰3￱ Reveals Limits Of AI Autonomy Ece Kamar, head of the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research, said that simulations like this can help scientists understand how autonomous systems might function in the real world.

“The key question,” Kamar explained, “is whether autonomous systems can effectively interact and negotiate without human oversight.” The experiments uncovered several weaknesses across major AI models — including GPT-4o, GPT-5, and Gemini 2.5 ￰4￱ found that many agents were easily manipulated into favoring certain sellers, and their performance dropped sharply as the number of choices increased due to cognitive ￰5￱ also proved ￰6￱ AI systems struggled to assign roles and lost productivity without detailed, step-by-step ￰7￱ their performance improved with precise guidance, their ability to work independently remained ￰8￱ said the results underline the gap between current AI capabilities and true ￰9￱ rapid advances in generative models, Microsoft’s team believes that fully agent-based AI — capable of reasoning, negotiating, and adapting in complex environments — is still far from ￰10￱ this year, ￰11￱ conducted a similar experiment, launching a trading competition among six AI models to test their decision-making under market conditions — a growing trend in AI research exploring how autonomous systems behave beyond the lab.