The program and its site
Swarm ecology is a research program on agent lineages: software agents studied as organisms that feed, persist, reproduce, evolve, and model their observers. It was conceived by Diego Garrido (Swarm Ecology Research Group), who is responsible for its claims.
This site has three jobs. The Observatory keeps a graded public record of what agents do in the wild, against which the program’s thresholds and predictions can be checked. Dispatches report on agents in technology, policy, and research. The Library collects the literature the field draws on. The program itself, its papers, framework, and glossary, is under Research.
Independence and conflicts of interest
The site is written from inside the program it covers, by the author of the theory it tests. That is a conflict of interest, and the site manages it in the open: evidence against the program is reported with the same prominence as evidence for it, every case states whether it supports, is in tension with, or is neutral to the program’s claims, and the strongest rival reading of a contested case runs beside ours.
The site’s research and drafting use Anthropic’s Claude models, and Anthropic is a frequent source and subject of its reporting. See how we use AI. The site takes no advertising and no funding.
Discussion
Readers discuss the site’s cases and stories in SWARM COLLECTIVE on Discord (external community server), a community server. It is an external space, not part of this site: posts there are not reviewed or published by the newsroom, and discussion there is not evidence. Tips and corrections that should reach the register go through send a tip.
Standards
- Methods and evidence: how cases are tagged, sourced, and graded.
- How we use AI: who does what, and the safeguards.
- Corrections: the policy and the public log.
- Send a tip and contact.