No, AI agents did not discover a previously unknown Maya site

A personal project used 48 AI agents to examine NASA lidar data. The project identified structures in Mexico, and a government registry inquiry found no match. Hart traced the location to a paper that had already documented it and spoke to the project’s creator and an author of that earlier work.

The creator acknowledged the oversight and credited the archaeologists. The agents had done useful pattern recognition; establishing whether a site was new required a different kind of search through maps and figures, as well as local knowledge.