Nick Shapiro

Independent

2026, San Francisco, Decentralized and Cooperative AI

Cooperation Under Scarcity: Reproducible Experiments with Real World Agents

AI agents are already running autonomously in the wild – but we know little about how they cooperate under real constraints. Nick Shapiro is running controlled experiments that clone deployed agents from identical checkpoints, place them in shared, limited-resource environments, and study what causes or hurts cooperation – releasing open-source tools so others can build on the methodology.