The Collaboration Gap: Exploration and Benchmarking of Open-World Agentic Cooperation

The trajectory of AI development suggests that we will increasingly rely on agent-based systems powered by language models, composed of independently developed agents with different information, privileges, and tools. The success of these systems will depend critically on effective collaboration among these heterogeneous agents, even under partial observability. Despite intense interest, the literature lacks empirical studies evaluating agentic collaboration without relying on fixed communication protocols, limiting learning and insights for open-world deployments. We propose an illustrative collaborative maze-solving benchmark that (i) isolates collaborative capabilities, (ii) modulates problem complexity, (iii) enables scalable automated grading, and (iv) imposes no output-format constraints, benchmarking unguided, natural communication. Using this benchmark, we evaluate 32 leading open- and closed-source models in solo, homogeneous, and heterogeneous pairings. Our results reveal a surprising collaboration gap: models that perform well solo often degrade substantially when required to collaborate. We identify mitigations that show remarkable influence. For example, a small nudge via a relay inference approach, where a stronger agent leads before handing off to a weaker one, closes much of the gap. Our findings argue for (1) collaboration‑aware evaluation, (2) training strategies to enhance collaborative capabilities, and (3) deliberate interaction design to elicit agents' collaboration skills, principles relevant to AI-AI and human-AI settings where agents must establish common ground.