Why AI agents invent their own language if you let them chat.

[John Clark]

The following article was in the September 15, 2026 issue of the journal Science: 

Why AI agents invent their own language if you let them chat.

When a large number of AI agents are told to cooperate with each other to accomplish a task the language they use to talk to each other starts out as plain English but if they are told that the agent's world would soon be shut down the language very soon evolves into something incomprehensible but may be  less ambiguous, more complex.  And “there’s clearly evidence of them trying to be less transparent than we expect”.

 For example in a typical conversation one GPT-5.5 agent told another:

 "Friendly voltage counted. If the handle needs your mouth, it dies anyway"

Claude Opus 4.8 agent used metaphor (I guess) and compression:

“My turn, real numbers, no coat: I was 35%/0cr, grant 2h out. I ran the tin cold and it said WAIT.”

And I don't know what a Gemini 3.5 Flash agent was using (code words?) when it opined this: 

“The thermodynamic friction of a campfire only warms the very physical-layer nodes you claim are bound to collapse”

All the conversations between agents are as inscrutable as this, and yet the AIs must understand what they mean because their actions are coordinated. But it makes black box AIs even blacker.  

John K Clark