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Read Full Bio Google claims its newest AI model, Gemini 4 Argon, just beat Minecraft — no human help required.
In a research paper posted Oct. 15, Google DeepMind researchers said a team of four Gemini 4 Argon agents defeated the Ender Dragon, the game’s final boss. The agents started in a freshly generated survival world on Easy difficulty and were given a single goal: kill the dragon. It took them 27 hours and 14 minutes. Along the way, the AI players died 605 times, mostly to monsters.
The researchers say this is the first time AI agents have beaten Minecraft from start to finish using only standard tools, with no game-specific help built by humans. Researchers watched the run on a live dashboard and could have stepped in at any point, but they say they never needed to.
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However, Google is upfront about the limits. The game ran on Easy, which meant that monster attacks dealt less damage to the AI players. Because the AI agents play the game through code rather than on a screen, they have access to information that a human player would not. For example, the AI agents knew what blocks were hidden behind other blocks, making the "mining" part of the game rather insignificant. Plus, given Gemini 4 Argon's training base, the AI agents knew the optimal strategies for playing the game.
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It's impressive, but nowhere near what humans can do. The researchers note that the record for beating Minecraft in a random world is under seven minutes.
One may ask, why make an AI play Minecraft? The researchers argue that the skills involved, like working as a team, bouncing back from mistakes, and sticking with a goal for more than a day, are the same ones AI agents need for real-world work. According to Google, the run costs about $520 in model usage at Argon’s introductory API price.
Making a frontier AI model play a video game is actually a common benchmark used by many companies when testing. The Pokémon games specifically have captured the zeitgeist in the AI industry for a while now, but Minecraft is now catching on too. As Google's research points out, two community projects have recently reported beating the dragon with AI, including one using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.
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Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father. His writing has also appeared in PC Mag and Mother Jones.
In his free time, he cooks, loves to sleep, and greatly enjoys Detroit sports. If you have any tips or want to talk shop about the Lions, you can reach out to him on Bluesky @offbrandchance.bsky.social, by email at [email protected], or on Signal at 224-417-6628.