Pietro Miotti’s November 10, 2026 announcement credited 48 AI agents with finding an unmapped Maya site in Mexico using NASA lidar data. On November 11, he corrected the central claim: archaeologists had already mapped the site in a 2025 paper. The agents had missed it during their literature search. Miotti’s updated account now describes a rediscovery.
The story had already attracted substantial attention. Its Hacker News discussion reached 1,009 points and hundreds of comments, with participants linking the earlier research. Those figures document the announcement’s reach, not independent validation of the workflow.
The correction leaves two useful findings to examine separately: agents apparently flagged structures that archaeologists had also mapped, but the process failed to establish whether those structures were previously unknown.
How the 48-Agent Workflow Worked
Miotti’s account describes work undertaken from October 18 to 21, before the November announcement. He began by exploring whether public lidar could help identify archaeological remains, eventually focusing on the Maya region because suitable data was available.
The workflow used Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Grok. According to Miotti, agents converted lidar strips covering approximately 1,200 square kilometers into images, then 48 agents inspected those images for pyramids, platforms and plazas while trying to exclude natural hills, sinkholes and roads. He says no specialized model or classifier was involved: the agents examined the pictures using a written guide. His post describes the process but is not a comparative evaluation of the four AI products.
Lidar helps here because an ordinary aerial image largely shows the forest canopy. Laser pulses passing through gaps in the vegetation can produce returns from the ground, allowing researchers to reconstruct terrain beneath the trees. Rendered terrain images can then expose regular shapes that are difficult to distinguish in satellite photographs.
One flagged hilltop contained what Miotti described as a leveled plaza, an oval pyramid approximately 8–12 meters tall, a raised courtyard and a hollow that might have held water. The agents also examined slices through the raw point cloud to check whether the shapes appeared in ground returns beneath the vegetation.
That second check matters. A suggestive shape in a rendered image deserves investigation, but checking the underlying measurements helps distinguish a ground feature from a canopy-related artifact. It still leaves archaeological interpretation unresolved: Miotti labels the proposed functions speculative, and his account cites no field survey establishing them.
