Four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft in 27 hours unaided

On October 19, 2026, The Next Web and IT之家 reported on a paper by Google DeepMind researchers published on arXiv: four AI agents running on Gemini 4 Argon defeated the Ender Dragon, Minecraft's final boss, without human help. According to The Next Web, the agents began in a randomly generated survival world on Easy difficulty and completed the run autonomously from writing their first program to the kill, taking 27 hours and 14 minutes.

IT之家 added further detail the same day. The researchers gave the four agents only the final goal and no strategy; all behavior was planned by the agents themselves. They coordinated through the in-game chat box and quickly divided tasks, with some building an enderman farm, others gathering food and others focusing on exploration. They shared combat tips and recovered lost equipment after a teammate died. Researchers could watch through a dashboard and issue pause or stop commands but had no authority to intervene. Over the run, the four agents sent 229 messages, ran 2,783 programs and died 605 times. They needed 13.5 hours to reach the End and spent the rest of the time defeating the Ender Dragon, consuming 1.35 billion input tokens at an estimated cost of about $1,620 at standard user pricing. The team said that, to its knowledge, this was the first time AI agents had completed Minecraft from start to finish fully autonomously, using only the standard Mineflayer.

The two reports agree on the completion time and the autonomous nature of the run. IT之家 supplied the message count, program count, death count, token usage and cost figures, which The Next Web's summary did not cover. Public information currently stops at the paper's release and the resulting media coverage.