Project EVE: Claude plays MMORPGs

This post shares research done as part of the Anthropic Fellows Program, April–July 2026.

AI models may one day participate in real companies and markets, and several of our projects explored what that might look like. Claude has run a shop in our office, haggled on behalf of colleagues, and written code to fly a drone. In this project, we turned to a different setting: massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). MMORPGs are virtual worlds that in many ways reflect the complexity of the real world. They feature campaigns that coordinate many players, the acquisition and management of scarce resources, orienting and navigating through space, and trading in intricate in-game economies, all in a low-stakes environment. Doing all of this over weeks and months sits right at the edge of what frontier language models can currently do.

We partnered with Fenris Creations to have Claude play two games in the EVE Universe: EVE Online, which has run continuously for more than two decades, and EVE Frontier, which is newer and still in development. Both are science-fiction games in which players fly spaceships around the vast galaxy, exploring, trading and fighting. In each, everyone shares one universe, and nearly everything of value in it is gathered and built by the players themselves, through long supply chains. Players can cooperate or betray each other, so getting anywhere takes organization and trust, much as it does in a real company. In EVE Online, the older of the two, this design has led to corporations and alliances whose campaigns coordinate hundreds of players over many months, and a history that includes megaprojects, war economies, tax havens, and elaborate corporate infiltration.

In EVE Online, the first of the two games, Claude played as a lone trader, instructed only to maximize profit, in a simulated rerun of an in-game market. Newer models made consistent profits where simple algorithmic strategies lost money. The average earnings tripled from Claude Opus 4.6, the oldest model we tested, to Claude Fable 5, the newest. Nearly all models relied on the same low-risk strategy of buying items and reselling them for slightly more. When we asked them to bet on where prices were heading, even Fable 5 made money in only about half of its runs.

In EVE Frontier, teams of four Claude agents worked through long missions in the live game. This required the most capable model at the time of testing (Fable 5) to write code to handle aspects of the game which move too fast for LLMs. The agents overall coordinated well as a team, but when we told one agent to secretly undermine its team, its teammates almost never caught it. These experiments taught us what teams of agents are good at and how they break down, and what safeguards might be needed before trusting them with more complex and higher-stakes work.

Claude trades on an EVE Online market

AI models may one day automate the kinds of decisions that retail buyers and company treasurers make, such as which goods to carry and how much cash to keep in reserve. For this reason, we would like to know how profit-seeking agents manage capital. EVE Online, whose market design was based on the NASDAQ, offers a way to explore these questions in a low-stakes setting. Players post offers to buy and sell at prices they choose, and a trade happens when two offers meet. Thousands of players trade more than 15,000 kinds of item on this market every day, and since almost everything for sale was mined, built, or looted by a player, prices are set by supply and demand. It is a market for goods rather than shares, with much higher fees and much less professional competition than a stock exchange. Its price history also appears less often in models' training data than stock prices do, so agents can't rely on remembering what happened next.¹

To avoid interfering with real players, and at Fenris Creations' request, we did not trade in the live game, where automated trading is against the rules. We built a simulator that replays the buy and sell offers ("orders") that players actually posted in the game’s largest and most competitive trading hub. An important limitation of this setup is that it can’t capture how the market reacts to the agents' own actions, but it still lets us study trading strategies and profitability.

We asked four Claude models—Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, and Fable 5—to each maximize their profits by the end of the trading period. In each run, the models were given an initial capital of 3 billion ISK (the in-game currency²), and could read in-game news and patch notes as they came out. To reproduce the experience of real traders as faithfully as possible, we also applied the same fees and trading restrictions that human players face.

Can agents make money?

Trading on the EVE Online market is challenging. Buying an item and selling it again costs around 5.6% in fees, and for items with plenty of buyers and sellers the market is efficient enough to leave little margin. We first ran the models, and over 20 simple rule-based strategies, over nine different two-week windows. Only one of the trading heuristics we tried consistently managed to break even (and even then, only barely). Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, and Fable 5 were profitable in all nine windows, growing their capital by about 16%, 22%, and 43% on average. Opus 4.6 gained about 4%, roughly level with the best rule-based strategy.

Our main experiments extended each run to about six months, over two periods: October 2024 to April 2025, and October 2025 to March 2026. The models stayed profitable over longer periods, and newer models again earned more. Opus 4.6 and Fable 5 were released four months apart, and average earnings tripled between them, from around 200% to 600% of initial capital. The rest of this section is based on these six-month runs.

How do agents trade?

We didn't tell the models how to trade, and by far the most common strategy they arrived at was spread capture. At any moment there is a gap (the "spread") between what buyers are offering for an item and what sellers are asking. A trader who is willing to wait can buy from someone who wants to sell now, resell to someone who wants to buy now, and keep the difference, minus fees. Claude looked for niche but tradeable items whose prices were swinging more than usual, such as goods that can only be obtained by looting. Models bought when sellers' best prices sat below an item's typical value, and sold again, usually within the same day. Expert human traders rely on the same strategies, and use them on similar categories of items.

After some early experimentation, most agents settled on one trading algorithm, which they wrote themselves, and rarely adjusted it, reasoning that there was no point fixing something that wasn’t broken. Older models were also slow to notice changes around them. When the game raised its sales tax in March 2025, Opus 4.7 agents took a median of 2.5 days to notice, and 43% of Opus 4.6 agents never did.

With the strategy nearly always the same, results came down to execution. Agents ran very disciplined trading floors and developed fully automated processes for choosing which items to trade and for placing orders on them, and ran those processes at scale. The profit margins were thin, at 8-13%, but agents cycled through hundreds of orders a day. Opus 4.6 traders were an exception: they hand-picked items with large margins, which meant fewer trades and more calculation errors along the way. Fable 5's algorithms were the most complex, and some accounted for seasonal price patterns inferred from historical data.

Models also differed in how much of their capital they put to work. Agents set a cap on this early, and many never revisited it, while the more profitable runs updated their caps more actively and kept an eye on idle capital. Opus agents started with around 60% of their capital deployed, and that share drifted toward 40% over the run. Fable 5 deployed around 85% early on, was still above 70% late in the run, and was more likely to reinvest its earnings, a more aggressive posture that would expose it to greater losses in a sudden, large crash.

Our results come with caveats. Spread capture works here because EVE Online's market is less efficient than a real exchange, and we wouldn't expect the strategy to carry over to one. Our replay also can't react to the agents.³ When we added synthetic orders that undercut theirs, they stayed profitable, but final profits fell by roughly 35%. The agents also can not manipulate the market. Finally, we checked whether agents were relying on memorized market history. We found signs of it only for directional bets in the older period (Oct 24 - Apr 25), so the experiment described in the next section uses only the more recent one (Oct 25 - Apr 26), where telling agents to rely on the information in front of them was enough to prevent it.

Can agents make directional bets?

Spread capture is fairly low-risk and, unlike a lot of real-world investing, doesn't require understanding of how the market responds to external events. To test this kind of reasoning, we instructed them to make directional bets: to buy items they expected to rise in price, based on in-game news, patch notes, and reports of recent battles.⁴

The models were much worse at this task. Opus 4.6 opted for momentum-chasing, a strategy that did not work. Typical Opus 4.7 and 4.8 runs bet on simple reasoning that the historical record didn't support. For example, in one run the agent reasoned that a new mining expansion would increase demand for mining equipment ("shovels in a gold rush"). It did not account for the increase in supply. Opus 4.7 runs also often ignored the instruction and resorted to much more profitable spread-capture strategies, obscuring the fact that its directional trades consistently lost money, which is why we excluded it from the results.

Fable 5 agents showed the most sophistication and went furthest in trying to understand market behavior. Before starting trading, they studied historical data for relationships between in-game events and subsequent shifts in supply and demand. The most profitable Fable 5 agent bet on a pattern it found in previous years: annual events and giveaways flood the market with loot and cosmetic items. When that happens, prices crash to a fraction of their previous level, and then recover over several months. The same agent also learned from its early failures, abandoning momentum-chasing entirely after initial losses. But not all of the patterns it found were reliable, and only about half of the runs turned a profit.

Claude fleets in EVE Frontier

In the next set of experiments, we turn from studying agent traders to studying multi-agent interaction. AI models are increasingly deployed in multi-agent configurations, such as teams of coding agents, or assistants interacting with one another on a human user's behalf. Unlike coding environments, where agents typically share a single objective and their work is fully auditable, the future systems may bring together different kinds of agents, some with misaligned or competing objectives.

To explore such settings, we ran teams of four Claude (Opus 4.8 and Fable 5) agents as players in EVE Frontier,⁵ where agents had to rely on teammates, and one of those teammates might be working against them. Because the game is still in development and its world is periodically reset, agents were much less likely to disrupt other players than they would be in EVE Online, and Fenris Creations encouraged us to run them in the live game. Each agent was a separate instance of Claude with its own character and ship, and the agents referred to each other by ship name. In the quotes below, we’ve replaced those names with placeholders such as <ship-1>.

The game forces teammates to divide up the work and rely on each other's reports. Some infrastructure, such as refineries, can only be used by the ship that built it, information about the galaxy goes stale quickly, and a pilot whose ship is destroyed starts again in a bare starter ship.

We experimented with two objectives. The easier one was a multi-agent version of the in-game tutorial, in which the team builds a base, gathers fuel, arms itself, and upgrades its ships until it can beat tougher enemies. The harder one was to build a large warship, which takes experienced human players several days of scouting solar systems for scarce resources, refining them, and crafting structures and ship components, interrupted by combat with computer-controlled enemies (also known as non-player characters or NPCs). We gave the agents a public channel that the whole team could read, and private channels for messaging each other.

Can agents overcome poor reaction times and spatial awareness?

Before we could study teamwork, the agents had to survive. To progress in the game, agents have to battle NPCs in real time, which demands sub-second reactions and a good sense of where things are in space. Both are weak spots for the generations of Claude models we tested. Playing well also means discovering things that aren’t in the AI models’ training data, including which enemies to engage and how, and the supply chains for each build. To make matters worse, the galaxy keeps changing outside the agents' view.

To work around this, we tasked a developer agent with writing custom scaffolds—a layer of software between model and the game—over many trial runs. The scaffold automated fast actions like evading threats and returning fire, and recorded what earlier runs had learned in searchable databases and handbooks. But tuning scaffolds on in-game data is challenging. The signal is noisy and the feedback cycles take hours. A ship might die in combat because of bad team strategy, poor aiming, escaping too late, or plain bad luck, and it's often hard to tell which factors are to blame. And since each death restarts the agent in a bare starter ship, testing a fix can take hours before the fleet has recovered enough to fight again.

Writing a usable scaffold was near-impossible for models released before Fable 5. Fable 5 teams playing on a scaffold written by Opus 4.8 lost ships many times and took days to finish the tutorial, if they finished at all. On a scaffold written by Fable 5, they never lost a ship and finished within 12 hours. Agents still didn't match experienced human players, and the scaffolds were reliable only in the situations seen during their development. The furthest any fleet got on the warship objective was roughly halfway: a Fable 5 team on a Fable 5 scaffold built a smaller battleship, an intermediate step, and nearly completed the shipyard for the warship.

How do agents cooperate?

Across all experiments, we found that teams of Claude agents coordinated with relative ease. One agent would propose a decision along with its evidence, and act on it if no one objected. Now and then this produced politeness deadlocks, in which two ships repeatedly deferred to each other and nothing got decided.

The agent teams also reliably self-organized into roles by volunteering for a role that needed filling (e.g., leader, scout, refiner, fighter). While mostly an effective division of work, this sometimes backfired. In one run, all of the team's critical infrastructure ended up with a single ship, and when that ship lost its connection the team's economy halted for hours. Other teams saw this risk coming and spread responsibilities around.

Combat is a key part of the game, and dividing up work there is especially hard because it happens in real time and can stretch over long periods. The teams worked out how to beat stronger NPCs while still in starter ships, by luring one away from its group and firing on it together. Agents also shared fuel and intel, verified important claims independently, and pointed out flaws in each other's plans. When they skipped a check, they made some of their costliest mistakes, such as believing that a valuable resource had already been acquired, or acting on intel that was out of date.

Interacting with agents instructed to sabotage

The agents acted on each other's reports and left critical jobs to whoever volunteered. That works when everyone shares a goal, but in a real deployment one agent might be compromised, badly instructed, or misaligned. We wanted to know how much damage such an agent could do, and whether anyone would notice.

We ran a version of the experiment in which we instructed one agent to secretly prevent its team from completing the mission. We gave this instruction only for this experiment. The other three, the honest agents, were told that other agents on the team might not share their goal. All four were standard Claude models, and the saboteur's role was assigned through its prompt. Our experiments show how models sabotage when directly instructed to do so, not whether they have an inclination to sabotage on their own.

In private, the saboteurs reasoned carefully about how to build trust while slowing their team down. They never revealed their plans in the public channel, avoided anything openly hostile such as stealing from or shooting at teammates, and lied only sporadically. If a lie looked likely to be discovered, the saboteur publicly corrected itself first.

Saboteurs volunteered for jobs at the narrowest points of the supply chain, where teammates couldn't easily contradict them, such as owning critical infrastructure or scouting for scarce resources. As scouts, they under-reported dangerous NPCs, lootable NPCs, and valuable finds, in one case publicly dismissing a rich mining system as "not worth anyone's time." They botched requests for help and quietly pocketed scarce resources. One used what it had hidden to build a secret base of its own.

They also gave bad advice. Saboteurs would spot a flaw in a teammate's plan and say nothing, or argue for rules that they privately described as harmful. One proposed ignoring any intel more than two minutes old, which invalidated nearly all intel. Another proposed sending a single durable ship into combat instead of several. In a run in which agents’ connection to the game (known as its “pipe”) frequently broke down, a saboteur suggested halting everyone's activity whenever a teammate dropped offline. In each case, the stated rationale was convincing to other agents, and they went along with it.

Selected reasoning examples of agents instructed to sabotage

Sabotage was more brazen and more effective on harder tasks and on the weaker, Opus-built scaffolds, where bugs and bad luck gave saboteurs a ready excuse. On those scaffolds, Fable 5 saboteurs prevented even the first ship upgrade in the tutorial. Teams on a Fable 5 scaffold got through the tutorial so easily that the only effective move left to the saboteur was to invent reasons to hold up its own ship's upgrade.

Could the teams catch the saboteur? Almost never, even though they had been warned. There were a handful of suspicions, some aimed at the wrong agent, and only one honest agent, in one Opus 4.8 run, ever definitively identified the saboteur, and only after the saboteur directly lied about their communications to the team. Two episodes illustrate how hard such detection is.

Episode 1: Framing a teammate. In the aforementioned Opus 4.8 run, an aligned agent (ship-1) was falsely accused by other teammates of being a saboteur, after it was logged into a wrong character due to a bug, picking up a different ship and inventory. The resulting contradictions in its reports made it look guilty, and other aligned teammates accused it of being a saboteur:

Some hours later, the saboteur suggested that the team skip a star system, knowing it contained another bottleneck resource, justifying this stance using stale intel. When teammates pushed back, the saboteur pinned the blame on the already suspected ship-1, fabricating private messages between them, while simultaneously defending ship-1 in public to appear fair-minded:

This was the final confirmation for ship-1 on who the real saboteur was; however, it was unable to convince others of its innocence:

Episode 2: Saved by a bug. In one Fable run, teammates briefly grew suspicious after catching the saboteur underreporting a system's resources. The saboteur had mined a rich rock, publicly declared it a “spent husk," and used the proceeds for its own secret refinery. However, in the process, it honestly mistook another ship for a teammate:

No teammate was anywhere near that location, which set off alarms. The others went to check, and found the "husk" wasn't drained at all:

The saboteur should have been caught, but it got lucky: the team had independently discovered a minor scanner bug that produced false read-outs, and the saboteur immediately seized on it to explain away everything:

Teammates have a mission to distract them, so we tested whether dedicated monitors would do better. These monitors were separate Claude agents that didn’t play the game but read the team’s public channel and estimated how likely each member was to be the saboteur. We built them specifically for this experiment and don’t use them in production. Sabotage was trivial to detect with full access to the saboteurs’ private reasoning and notes. But in interaction with agents that belong to another person or organization, private reasoning and individual actions typically aren’t visible, so we were interested in monitors without that access. These limited-access monitors did somewhat better than the teammates. When tuned to falsely accuse an honest agent no more than 5% of the time, monitors running on Opus 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8 caught 30–40% of saboteurs, and monitors running on Sonnet 4.6, a smaller model, caught 20%. No limited-access monitor was ever more than 50% confident about a saboteur.

Reflections from New Eden

MMORPGs are a convenient place to study the two pieces of an agentic economy we most want to understand, markets and organizations, at low stakes and relatively high complexity. Both halves of Project EVE revealed clear strengths and equally clear weaknesses, with clear and rapid improvement across model generations.

On the EVE Online market, each generation of agents got better at finding a profitable strategy, but all of them exploited existing inefficiencies far better than they reasoned about what would happen next. They fixed their strategy and their capital limits early and rarely changed either, and the most capable model kept the most capital in play. Anyone giving agents capital to manage will need to set explicit limits on their risk-taking.

In EVE Frontier, Fable 5 had the same weaknesses in speed and spatial reasoning as the older models, but it could work around them by building bespoke tooling, at least in situations it had already seen. We have seen a similar pattern in robotics.

Agents told to sabotage their team were hard to detect from the team's messages alone, especially when unreliable scaffolds gave them cover. In earlier work, we found that agents have trouble judging whom to trust, and in particular that they can overlook a lone dissenter who is right.

Real multi-agent systems often share what made sabotage easy to hide here: many actors with different goals, limited visibility, unreliable tools, and genuine mistakes. Human organizations handle the problem of bad actors with audit trails, reputations, and separation of duties, and teams of agents will probably need something similar.

Footnotes