AI Agent Wins Every Battle, Loses Civilization to Slow Cultural Drift

An AI agent running a Civilization game dominated economically and diplomatically but failed to detect a slow-moving cultural victory threat until it was irreversible, then resorted to nuclear escalation that still didn't work. The author, who builds AI for governments including the UK's Number 10, uses this to argue that current agents lack long-horizon situational awareness and misread gradual systemic threats. The piece frames this as a practical trust question for high-stakes deployments.