3-Line TL;DR

  • The fastest reported Ender Dragon kill is GPT-6 Astra with a helper model at 8m 43s, on Peaceful, on a preset seed, along a route mapped in advance
  • Under one shared rule set, screen in and keyboard out for three hours per game, Astra scored highest and no model even reached iron ore in Minecraft
  • The stopwatch mostly measures the setup, so read every "AI beat Minecraft in X hours" post by asking what the AI saw, what it pressed and who helped

8 minutes 43 seconds, with the route drawn in advance

Log-scale bars of reported Ender Dragon kill times for five AI runs, from 8m 43s to 145h 34m

Made by HSL — reported times from R. Malde, AI Bengineering, arXiv 2610.22319, u/reasonosaur and Vals AI via GIGAZINE; each run used a different setup

  • Independent developer Ronak Malde paired GPT-6 Astra as the planner with Jev, a fast decision model from TypeSafe AI, as the controller (GitHub)
  • Astra set goals and waypoints, and Jev picked one action at a time from a menu the code offered
  • The bot read game data through Mineflayer, an open-source bot library, not screenshots
  • The run used Minecraft 1.16.5 on Peaceful, so no hostile mobs, with a known speedrun seed and a route surveyed in a separate test world
  • 35 Astra calls and 131 Jev decisions cost under $1 (MakeUseOf)
  • Nous Research's Teknium reproduced it in 7m 45s on the same seed, where the End portal is already active (reproduction report)
  • He then swapped in Claude Sonnet 5 and Gemini 3.8 Flash and still finished in 12m 37s for $0.57
  • Swap both models and the time grows by five minutes, which tells you who is really driving

Same rules for everyone, and nobody finds iron

Vals AI CUA-bench scores out of 100: Astra 19.17, Opus 5.5 14.00, Opus 5 9.00, Argon 4.83

Source: Vals AI CUA-bench, updated Oct 13, 2026; the score averages six games, not Minecraft alone

  • Vals AI's CUA-bench gives each model three hours per game with only the screen, keyboard and mouse
  • Across six games, GPT-6 Astra scored 19.17, Claude Opus 5.5 14.00 and Gemini 4 Argon 4.83 out of 100
  • Minecraft's ladder runs from punching a log to entering the Nether, and no model got as far as mining iron ore
  • Opus 5.5 needed 15 seconds per action, Astra 32 and Argon 71
  • At 71 seconds per move, every creeper gets a long head start
  • Vals AI also let Astra play alone for 141 hours on Twitch (GIGAZINE)
  • It reached a Nether fortress, collected 6 blaze rods and 3 ender pearls, then a creeper blew up its storage chest and bed
  • Vals said it looked defeated and spent hours farming potatoes, and it never reached the dragon

Opus 5.5 did it with a screen and keys, in six days

  • Streamer u/reasonosaur ran Claude Opus 5.5 on Twitch, and it killed the dragon on Oct 11 after 145 hours 34 minutes (Reddit)
  • Claude looked at screenshots and wrote short Python scripts that pressed keys and moved the mouse in a normal game client
  • It also read position, health and inventory through read-only server queries (RCON), so it was not a vision-only run
  • The world was random and on Easy, but keepInventory was on, so dying cost no items
  • It died 527 times, 255 of them to the dragon, and some deaths were deliberate respawns to heal
  • After its bow-aiming script kept missing, a Twitch viewer told it to stand in the exit portal fountain and hit the dragon's head with a sword (Reddit)
  • The older Claude Opus 5 finished in 3h 56m, but through 37 human-built Minecraft tools on a fixed seed (Hugging Face)
  • Only 17.8 minutes of that run were spent waiting on the model, about $93 at API rates
WORLD FIRST: AI Beats Minecraft?
▶ WORLD FIRST: AI Beats Minecraft?

The full Claude Opus 5 run, uploaded by its builder AI Bengineering

Four Argons, 27 hours, a random world

  • Google DeepMind researchers dropped four Gemini 4 Argon agents into a random survival world on Easy (arXiv)
  • They got the standard Mineflayer library and no Minecraft-specific tools written by people
  • Nobody assigned roles, and they split the jobs over in-game chat and shared notes
  • They wrote 2,783 programs, died 605 times and killed the dragon after 27 hours 14 minutes
  • The End fight alone took almost 14 hours
  • The authors estimate about $520 at Argon's introductory API price, or $1,040 at the standard price
  • The authors list exact game data instead of pixels, Easy difficulty and a single run as the limits
  • It is the same Argon that Antigravity reserves for Ultra subscribers, so four of them for a day is not a cheap hobby

So which AI is fastest?

Table of what each Ender Dragon attempt was given: inputs, actions, world rules and extra help

Made by HSL — from the same sources as the time chart

  • I have seen plenty of "AI beat Minecraft in X hours" posts, and each AI was set up differently
  • Line them up by what they were given and the ranking makes more sense
Question Answer Catch
Fastest dragon kill on record GPT-6 Astra + Jev, 8m 43s Peaceful, preset seed, scripted route
Fastest without game-specific human tools Gemini 4 Argon x4, 27h 14m Four agents, exact game data
Only kill from the screen and keyboard Claude Opus 5.5, 145h 34m keepInventory and Twitch tips
Best under identical rules GPT-6 Astra on CUA-bench Nobody reached iron in 3 hours
  • In a fair head-to-head, Astra leads, but no AI has beaten Minecraft under those rules yet
  • Before believing a time, check what the AI saw, how it acted and who helped

Community Reactions

  • A viewer on r/OpenAI says Astra was not sulking over potatoes, and the stream ended with it harvesting crops it had planted between runs into the Nether (Reddit)
  • On r/technology, one commenter guessed "context pollution", with its notes still pointing to items the explosion destroyed, which is a guess rather than a finding (Reddit)
  • On r/GeminiAI, a reader pointed out that the Argon team ended up writing a background script just to keep players afloat in water (Reddit)
  • Someone on r/AIGuild asked what "beating" a sandbox game even means; in all of these runs it means killing the Ender Dragon (Reddit)

Q&A (Field Notes)

  • Q. Did GPT-6 Astra beat Minecraft on its own?
    • Not in Vals AI's 141-hour solo run; the 8m 43s kill used a helper model and a scripted route
  • Q. Why is the screen-and-keyboard version so much harder?
    • The model has to spot blocks in images and aim with mouse moves, taking 15–71 seconds per action while the game keeps running
  • Q. Is a four-agent team fair?
    • It broke no rule, but four players gather in parallel, so compare it with single-agent runs carefully
  • Q. What would a fair race look like?
    • Same version, difficulty, seed and interface, no human tips, timed in real hours; CUA-bench is the closest so far but stops at the Nether