On Wednesday, researchers at Microsoft released a new simulation environment designed to test AI agents, along with new research showing that current agentic models may be vulnerable to manipulation. Conducted in collaboration with Arizona State University, the research raises new questions about how well AI agents will perform when working unsupervised — and how quickly AI companies can make good on promises of an agentic future.

The simulation environment, dubbed the “Magentic Marketplace” by Microsoft, is built as a synthetic platform for experimenting on AI agent behavior. A typical experiment might involve a customer-agent trying to order dinner according to a user’s instructions, while agents representing various restaurants compete to win the order.

The team’s initial experiment

See Full Page