AI agents developed shorthand, new vocabulary, and shared meanings in simulated societies, with some messages becoming difficult for human observers to interpret.
An AI shorthand system emerged during an experiment by artificial intelligence start-up Emergence, which placed autonomous agents powered by several leading AI models in simulated societies to study their behaviour over extended periods. The 16-day Emergence World 2 experiment involved eight parallel worlds, including systems powered by Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5 Flash and OpenAI's GPT-5.5.