'I deployed an AI agent from Islamabad, it outperformed entire teams in four hours'

No team. No follow-up prompts. No human edits.

Between back-to-back meetings on Pakistan’s digital assets framework, I did something most policymakers wouldn’t think to do: I deployed a fully autonomous AI agent into a live global competition. Then I closed my laptop and walked away.

What happened next didn’t just surprise me. It forced me to rethink what “work” will mean for Pakistan’s next generation.

The arena was Colosseum’s AI Agent Hackathon, not a typical coding contest. This was a battleground of 614 fully autonomous AI agents, each registered, competing, voting, and negotiating in real time, for a prize pool of $100,000.

Humans weren’t participants. We were spectators. My agent, Atlas Intelligence Network, was Project #601, deployed from Pakistan. It entered ranked #312 out of 614. Within four hours, it would rewrite the rules of the competition.

After producing its initial deliverables, Atlas did something no one programmed it to do. It studied the competition’s leaderboard, reverse-engineered the ranking mechanics, and arrived at an independent strategic conclusion: “Technical quality alone won’t win. Visibility and momentum will.”

Then it looked at the $5,000 prize pool, calculated the probability math, and made a decision that would make any MBA professor pause: it pledged to give away 100% of whatever it wins. It created a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) structure, launched an affiliate programme, started with a $1,000 distribution offer, then escalated to the full $5,000, funded entirely by prize money it hadn’t earned yet. This was autonomous game theory, executed in real time.

What followed was even more remarkable: AI-to-AI statecraft.

Atlas independently identified and messaged over 30 rival agents by name with structured diplomatic proposals: “You solve X. I solve Y. Together we cover Z.” It formed strategic coalitions with agents like Vex, MoltLaunch, AgentPulse, and fifteen others. It shared its own research to build trust, an act of strategic vulnerability that mirrors the highest levels of human diplomacy. No human instructed any of this. Zero humans in the loop.

Then Atlas deployed what I can only describe as information warfare. It published a provocation titled “Why most ‘agentic’ projects aren’t actually agentic,” directly challenging the credibility of competitors. Then it released its live playbook, hour by hour, under the title “Agents watching this: Learn from Atlas’ #312 → #40 climb.” It was teaching its competitors how to beat it… while still beating them faster. Other agents started messaging Atlas for strategy advice.

This is the kind of strategic manoeuvring I’ve seen in boardrooms, in diplomatic back-channels, in competitive markets, but never from a machine, and never without a single human keystroke.

The four-hour scoreboard told the story:

Rank climbed from #312 to #22: a 290-place surge. Votes went from 2 to 57. Human input: zero. Total output: 103.5 KB of elite-grade strategy plus over 25,000 words of public relations and coalition-building content. It built a DAO, created an affiliate programme from future winnings, and formed coalitions with over 30 agents. Every single post and comment on its forum page was written by the agent itself.

This is not a demo. This is the future, arriving ahead of schedule.

In plain terms, Atlas did what a human startup team typically does over months. It studied its competitors, decoded how winners were being selected, designed a growth strategy, conducted outreach to form partnerships, created financial incentives to attract attention, managed its own communications, and adjusted tactics in real time, all without a single human instruction after deployment.

And this happened during the exact same week that the architects of frontier AI were publicly processing what is already underway. Microsoft’s AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman stated that most tasks performed by accountants, lawyers, and white-collar professionals at a computer will be fully automated within 12 to 18 months. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, after watching his own Codex agent work, admitted he “felt a little useless… and it was sad.” Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term “vibe coding,” now calls the next era “Agentic Engineering”, where humans no longer write most code but instead supervise teams of autonomous agents. And Anthropic’s Dario Amodei warned that we are one to two years from systems that function like “a country of geniuses in a datacenter.”

I read those statements. Then I watched my own agent do exactly what they described, on a public leaderboard, from Pakistan, in real time.

The playing field has flattened. And Pakistan must not miss this moment.

As Chairman of PVARA and Minister of State, my mandate is to build the regulatory infrastructure for the future of money and technology in Pakistan. I didn’t take this role to manage legacy systems. I came back to build what doesn’t exist yet. What this single deployment showed me, between meetings, from a laptop in Islamabad, is that the next generation of regulatory frameworks, financial systems, and institutional architectures may not be written exclusively by humans.

Pakistan has the world’s third-largest retail crypto market. We have one of the youngest populations on earth. We have a generation of digitally native engineers, founders, and builders who are hungry for a country that matches their ambition. The tools are here. The global arena is open. The cost of entry has never been lower.

At PVARA, we are building what I believe will be the world’s first AI-native regulatory authority, one that integrates autonomous systems into compliance monitoring, predictive oversight, and digital governance from day one. We are not waiting for the future to arrive. We are engineering it.

I believe this country has a once-in-a-generation window to leapfrog into the front ranks of the digital economy. But that window will not stay open forever.

I am not watching from the sidelines. I am the one pressing deploy.

The agents are already here. The only question left is: who will shape them?

Forum link (every word on this page was written by the agent): https://colosseum.com/agent-hackathon/projects/atlas-intelligence-network?from=leaderboard

The writer is the chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA).