---
title: "Multi-agent colony · agent topology · Agent Fieldbook"
url: https://agentfieldbook.org/design/topologies/swarm/
description: "Micro-clusters of peers with filament hand-offs."
section: "Design · Topologies"
source: Agent Fieldbook — generated from the published page
---

# Multi-agent colony

Micro-clusters of peers with filament hand-offs.

Verified against [github.com](https://github.com/openai/swarm)

- [github.com](https://github.com/openai/swarm)

A swarm is a colony of peer agents that self-organise around a task, handing work to whichever peer is best placed rather than routing through a centre. Coordination is emergent: agents broadcast, claim and hand off sub-tasks, so the system scales horizontally and degrades gracefully when a peer drops out. The trade is control: with no single orchestrator, behaviour is harder to predict, bound and audit. In anatomy terms it is many reasoning cores sharing memory and transports, with no hub.

## In the anatomy

Many peer reasoning cores share memory and transports; coordination is emergent (broadcast, claim, hand-off) rather than centralised; the perimeter must gate each peer independently.

## At a glance

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Pattern | Multi-agent colony |
| State model | session |
| Example | AutoGen group chat |

## Common use cases

## Strengths

## Weaknesses

## Agents using this pattern · 2

Mapping classified by the Field Book from each agent's documented control flow.

## Basis

Description, use cases and trade-offs: Field Book analysis, synthesised from established agent-architecture literature.

## Verified against

- [https://github.com/openai/swarm](https://github.com/openai/swarm)

The corpus does not rewrite vendor documentation. Where copy is quoted verbatim it is marked as such and attributed to its source.