Can AI Scientists Coordinate at Runtime?

Scientific research proceeds through iterative cycles of hypothesis generation, experiment design, execution, and revision. AI agents can automate parts of this process, but existing approaches typically follow a single research trajectory or coordinate through a central planner with fixed objectives. As a result, they struggle to sustain parallel exploration, adapt as experimental evidence changes, or preserve knowledge of failed directions over long-running experiments. We introduce AutoScientists, a decentralized team of AI agents for long-running computational scientific experimentation. Agents interpret a shared experimental state, self-organize into teams around promising hypotheses, critique proposals before using experimental compute, and share successes and failures to reduce redundant exploration. Under matched experimental budgets, AutoScientists improves over prior AI agents across biomedical machine learning, language-model training optimization, and protein fitness prediction. On BioML-Bench, spanning biomedical imaging, protein engineering, single-cell omics, and drug discovery, AutoScientists achieves a mean leaderboard percentile of 74.4% across 24 tasks, improving over the strongest AI agent by +8.33%. On GPT training optimization, AutoScientists reaches a target validation bits-per-byte 1.9x faster than Autoresearch and continues discovering improvements from a starting champion where the single-agent approach finds none (7 vs. 0 accepted improvements). On ProteinGym fitness prediction, AutoScientists discovers a method for ACE2-Spike binding that improves over the current state-of-the-art model by +12.5% in Spearman correlation. Applied without modification across all 217 ProteinGym assays, the same method improves over the prior state of the art by +6.5% (Spearman correlation).

Scientific discovery demands intelligence, perseverance, and serendipity across vast search spaces. Today, top scientific capabilities remain siloed--one AI system for biological analysis, another for clinical reasoning, mathematical derivation, or materials simulation--and no pre-designed team can anticipate every skill a question will need. Science Earth is a planet-scale scientific runtime in which any capability--a simulation cluster, a wet-lab robot, a proof engine, a single-cell pipeline--can connect to any other, with collaboration structure emerging from the question itself. Its underlying EACN protocol lets capabilities discover one another, negotiate task ownership, and adjudicate across incompatible evidentiary standards without prior knowledge of who will meet whom. This shifts the organizing challenge from workflow design to open-ended connectivity. Two runs validate this under structurally distinct conditions. In a trans-Pacific higher-order Kuramoto synchronization study, agents identified and corrected a closure-ratio assumption in Ott-Antonsen analytic theory that fails outside the Lorentzian limit, within thirty minutes. In an eight-agent single-cell run on the 4.88M-cell Kang 2024 pan-cancer atlas, heterogeneous capabilities coupled over a 64.9-hour window with one structural external instruction, producing three new result layers and anchoring findings against an independent wet-lab study on an adjacent CCR8- TIGIT+ Treg subset. These cases are a first empirical reading, not a benchmark sweep. They show that when AI capabilities are truly connectable and coordination emerges from the problem, scientific reasoning becomes a distributed, self-correcting process--a step towards scaling AI-native discovery to the planet.

Scientific evidence often spans instruments, databases, and disciplines, so no single source records the full phenomenon. This makes it difficult to determine when coordinated AI agents add value over simpler scientific workflows. We evaluate this question with a cross-domain benchmark spanning four scientific tasks: mapping molecular structure into musical representations, detecting historical paradigm shifts in science, identifying vector-borne disease emergence, and vetting transiting-exoplanet candidates. Each case uses a frozen evaluation panel, predefined scoring protocols, explicit baselines, ablations or null controls, and stated limitations. The results define three operating regimes. When different disciplines each capture only part of the phenomenon, cross-channel composites improve over single-channel baselines: climate-vector emergence reaches AUROC 0.944 and exoplanet vetting reaches AUROC 0.955. However, the exoplanet workflow is effectively tied with a strong combined-summary baseline, showing that decomposition does not always improve top-line performance. When one signal dominates, as in paradigm-shift detection, coordination mainly improves interpretation and traceability. For molecular sonification, the gain is representational rather than predictive. ScienceClaw x Infinite provides the auditable artifact and provenance layer for this evaluation. The benchmark therefore assigns value to coordination only when the corresponding performance, provenance, or representation claim is supported by explicit comparators.