adminFenris Creations AI partnerships will be led by former Icelandic minister Áslaug Arna Sigurbjörnsdóttir, who has joined the company as senior director for AI partnerships. Her role includes guiding a research initiative in Eve Frontier that will bring together AI laboratories, universities, policymakers and other strategic partners to study autonomous systems.
Image credit: Fenris Creations
Fenris Creations AI partnerships and the Eve Frontier research plan
The project will examine how autonomous AI agents set goals, respond to changing circumstances and make decisions over longer periods. Sigurbjörnsdóttir says her experience in public service showed her how important practical evidence is to decision-makers evaluating emerging technologies. She has said she wants to help contribute to the changes AI is bringing and support the work at Fenris responsibly.
Sigurbjörnsdóttir entered Iceland’s parliament in 2016 and became the country’s youngest Minister of Justice in 2019. In 2021, she was appointed Minister of Higher Education, Science and Innovation, a position she held until December 2024. After taking leave to attend Columbia University, she resigned as an MP in June. She has described public service experience as useful beyond government, including in the fast-changing field of artificial intelligence.
Why a persistent virtual world matters
Eve Frontier is intended to support both human players and autonomous participants. Its persistent, single-shard structure means the world, economy and social network continue rather than resetting between sessions. According to Sigurbjörnsdóttir, this creates conditions for studying how agents behave when actions have ongoing consequences.
That setup may help researchers explore questions that short-lived simulations cannot fully address: whether an agent’s behaviour changes as circumstances evolve, how other participants respond to it, and whether trust and reputation carry over. In Eve Frontier, prices reflect activity across the shared economy, while an agent’s conduct can affect how it is regarded throughout the world. The game also features imperfect information, long task horizons and lasting outcomes; actions consume energy, and mistakes or debts are not simply erased by a reset.
Sigurbjörnsdóttir is also interested in how agents handle skills such as judgement, negotiation and interpreting intent. These abilities can be explored through repeated interactions with people and other agents. She argues that studying mixed human-and-agent communities in a controlled virtual setting could offer insights before similar interactions become widespread in real-world settings.
Research partners and next steps
Fenris Creations’ research effort builds on its partnership with Google DeepMind. The partnership was announced as the developer transitioned from CCP Games after its $120 million sale to Pearl Abyss. Google also acquired a minority stake in the studio.
Sigurbjörnsdóttir says she has met with teams from Fenris Creations and Google DeepMind to discuss practical collaboration. However, she intends for the initiative to extend beyond any single partner. The plan is to include other AI laboratories, universities and policy institutions, so that research findings can be useful across the wider field rather than belonging to one organization.
Early discussions have begun with potential partners, including frontier AI labs, academic researchers, AI safety institutes and regulators. Fenris Creations hopes to widen participation in the coming months. For readers following AI research, the key point is that Eve Frontier is being positioned as a long-running environment for observing autonomous agents alongside people.
What the initiative could reveal
Games have already been used to evaluate AI in settings such as Atari titles, AlphaGo and StarCraft 2. Sigurbjörnsdóttir notes that those environments reset, while Eve Frontier is designed to persist. That difference could make it possible to study how behaviour develops over time, including the effects of reputation, economic choices and repeated social encounters.
Fenris Creations AI partnerships will therefore focus not only on building autonomous agents, but also on gathering evidence about how they act in a continuing shared world. Collaboration across research, education and policy may help make that evidence more broadly relevant.
