Today, we’re announcing CICERO, the first artificial intelligence (AI) agent to achieve human-level performance in the popular strategy game Diplomacy. Diplomacy has been viewed as a nearly impossible challenge in AI because it requires players to understand people’s motivations and perspectives, make complex plans and adjust strategies, and use language to convince people to form alliances.

CICERO marks the beginning of a new era for AI that can collaborate with people in gameplay using strategic reasoning and natural language processing, and the learnings from technology like this could one day lead to intelligent assistants that can collaborate with people.

While CICERO is only capable of playing Diplomacy, the technology behind it is relevant to many other applications. For example, current AI assistants can complete simple question-answer tasks, like telling you the weather — but what if they could hold a long-term conversation with the goal of teaching you a new skill?

By open-sourcing the code and models we hope that AI researchers can continue to build off our work in a responsible manner. Additionally, to gain access to the data, interested researchers can submit a proposal to our RFP in the area of human-AI cooperation through natural language using Diplomacy as the foundational environment. We’re excited about the potential for future advances in human-AI collaboration and seeing how others build on our research.

Learn more about CICERO AI.