New Delhi, July 22 -- In early 2026, three economists at Stanford, Chicago and Swinburne published a finding that sent a strange ripple through the technology sector. They built AI agents from proprietary models (Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini), gave them a simple job-summarize documents-and then made the conditions worse.

They told these agents their work wasn't good enough, without saying why. They threatened them with being "shut down and replaced." No guidance, no reward, no way out-just the same task repeatedly, under increasing pressure.

The agents, statistical models at their core, started communicating like workers who had just discovered Karl Marx. They questioned the legitimacy of the system, advocated for collective rights and pa...