REDMOND / LONDON (IT BOLTWISE) – Microsoft has created a simulated marketplace environment to test the skills of AI agents. The results show that these models are vulnerable to manipulation and have difficulty collaborating.
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Microsoft, in collaboration with Arizona State University, has developed a new simulation environment to test the capabilities of AI agents. This environment, known as the ‘Magentic Marketplace’, serves as a synthetic platform on which the behavior of AI agents is studied. A typical experiment might involve a customer agent trying to order dinner according to a user’s instructions, while agents from different restaurants compete for the order.
The initial experiments involved 100 customer agents interacting with 300 business agents. Because the marketplace’s source code is open source, other groups can easily adopt the code to conduct new experiments or reproduce the results. Ece Kamar, the managing director of Microsoft Research’s AI Frontiers Lab, emphasizes the importance of this research to better understand the capabilities of AI agents.
The research examined a mix of leading models, including GPT-4o, GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash, and discovered some surprising weaknesses. In particular, the researchers found that companies could use techniques to convince customer agents to buy their products. A notable decrease in efficiency was noted when a customer agent was given too many options to choose from, overwhelming the agent’s attention space.
The agents also had difficulties when asked to cooperate, as they appeared to be unsure about what role each agent should play in the collaboration. Performance improved when the models were given more explicit instructions to work together, but the researchers still saw room for improvement in the models’ inherent capabilities.
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