A Persistent Fleet of AI Scientists Exhibits Cooperative and Autopoietic Behavior

Authors

Patel, M. S., Wierson, W. A., Ekker, S. C.

Abstract

Scientific work depends on memory, provenance, and continuity across projects, yet most agentic scientist systems are evaluated in bounded workflows or short benchmark runs. We describe a persistent fleet of cooperative AI scientist agents that operated continuously for nearly six months using shared memory, tools, and cross-agent communication. Critically, failures identified during longitudinal scientific research in this fleet prompted an advanced and recursively improving persistent memory architecture (MoE) that, with agentic science workflows, induced the generation of a novel trust architecture for the enablement of full provenance across all agentic scientific operations. An identity-level fabrication constraint reduced delusion-reinforcement probe failures from 91.7% to 0%, and a verification pipeline reduced wrong-topic citation hallucination more than 14-fold in companion benchmarks. This high provenance enabled the use of project memory systems to improve a local open-weight model on internal benchmarks from 44% to ~90% through the deployment of fleet-specific institutional knowledge. This high-fidelity data environment also supported to date 104 recurring multi-phase reasoning cycles and produced 43 manually curated hypotheses, including cross-domain convergence events and a self-correcting rare-disease pharmacological chaperone-design case. While by design the fleet did not achieve unconstrained autonomous self-improvement or full autopoiesis, we term this bounded pattern AI Autopoietic Behavior due to the recurring operational improvement mediated by internal feedback and retained through institutional records with high confidence. Together, persistent memory, trusted provenance, and recursive learning shifted these agents from episodic assistants toward accountable, long-term scientific collaborators.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 20 Aug 2026.

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