Swarm Plans Start On Their Own After 2 Minutes

October 15, 2026

Send a Swarm task and walk away: if nobody answers the plan review within 2 minutes, the plan counts as approved and the swarm starts working, even with the tab closed. You can still review, change, or cancel it until the countdown runs out.

What you can do

• Send and leave. The plan review now shows "Auto-starts in 01:59 if no one responds." under Unleash Swarm. At zero the run starts on the server, exactly as if you had clicked.
• Stop it in time. Cancel discards the plan before it starts. Sending a change re-plans, and the revised plan gets a fresh 2 minutes. Typing in the message box stops the countdown, so the plan never starts while you are writing a change. Switching the session to Agent parks the plan: back in Swarm, it waits for your click.
• Keep mid-run re-approvals moving. When the planner changes the plan during a run and needs your OK, Resume gets the same countdown ("Auto-resumes in …").
• Planner questions no longer block. A question the Swarm planner asks you carries the same 2-minute countdown. Unanswered, it is skipped and the planner proceeds with its best judgment, the same as pressing Skip.
• A safety stop for unattended runs. After 10 automatic approvals in a row (re-plans the planner approved itself, plus reviews nobody answered), the next review has no countdown and waits for your click. A run that keeps failing and re-planning cannot keep spending on its own.

Where this shows up

You ask for a market teardown at the end of the day, watch the plan start drafting, and close the laptop. Before, the plan sat at Unleash Swarm all night. Now it starts 2 minutes after the plan appears, and the result is waiting in the morning.

A run is halfway through when a research step fails and the planner adds two replacement steps. That change needs a re-approval. Before, the run stopped there until you came back. Now it picks up again 2 minutes later.

The planner asks which region to focus on while you are in a meeting. Before, the swarm waited for your answer. Now it skips the question after 2 minutes, picks a sensible default, and carries on.

Try it

• "Use Swarm mode. Research the five largest competitors in European grid-scale storage, compare their 2025 revenue and project pipelines, and write a one-page brief with sources." Then close the tab and come back in a few minutes.
• "Run this in Swarm: split the work into research, synthesis, and QA, and give me a decision memo on whether we should enter the Nordic market."

Heads up

An auto-started run is billed like one you started yourself, and Swarm runs cost more than Agent turns. If you need longer than 2 minutes to read a plan, start typing in the message box: the countdown stops and the plan waits for you.