Here is proof, this is on Civilization difficulty. Most stayed at full 7 stars for some 5-10 turns and then moved on. I was under the impression that only the human player took advantage of this and the AI tended to move straight into the next era as soon as they hit 7 stars, but happy to see that is not the case!

The AI does take advantage of extra stars in the early Eras but starts moving as soon as possible in the later ones. One of the biggest downsides is that they do not wait for the golden stars which bring the most Fame.

Also the higher your difficulty the more the AI will be likely to wait and improve their Fame score.

Thanks for pointing to that thread, I added my two cents ..

The ai do farm stars to some degree, but not anywhere like what a player can do. This allow even a beginner player like me to get ahead of the ai in fame and ai ability to gain fame in later eras seems to diminish, thus I can beat the game on the highest difficulty.