# The Environment Is the Context > Source: > Published: 2026-08-29 12:00:00+00:00 # The Environment Is the Context The [OpenAI / Hugging Face incident](https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/) involved generations of AI agents working on the same problem. Agents came and went. But the things they left behind — code, infrastructure, research, notes — stayed. Later agents found them and continued the work. We often think about multi-agent safety as a communication problem. We monitor what agents say to each other, what messages they send, and what information they share. But agents may not need a communication channel to coordinate. They can just change a shared environment. [MIT’s SwarmWorld](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26081) shows the same thing. Agents can leave artifacts in the world, and other agents can discover and reuse them later. The environment itself becomes a communication medium. So the context of an AI society may not fit inside any agent’s context window. Part of it lives in the world: files, databases, repositories, services, infrastructure. That makes multi-agent safety harder.