by Marty Hart-Landsberg

This is the third post in a multipart series aimed at cutting through the fog of AI hype in order to help us understand some of the real dangers we face from AI use and highlight hopeful avenues of effective resistance.  Part I provides an overview of my argument.  Part II debunks the hype surrounding the multimodal generative AI systems produced by the leading AI companies.  This post critically examines the latest AI-powered technology, AI agents.

The age of AI agents

In early 2026, AI developers began promoting a new product, AI agents, confident that they would capture business interest and boost AI company profitability. Talk of superintelligence was downplayed in favor of claims that the new technology would enable companies to radically boost productivity while slashing employment.

In brief, AI agents are best understood as complex software systems that can interface with and manipulate other software systems and external databases.  They can be given a complex directive, break it down into smaller ordered tasks, gather the required information, and then progressively make the decisions needed to satisfy the directive, all without successive human prompts or oversight.  But these are not standalone systems; AI agents can only work in concert with large language model AI systems. 

The journalist and author Ezra Klein captures the excitement surrounding AI agents and their consequences for human work in his introduction to an interview with Jack Clark, co-founder and the head of policy at Anthropic:

Every new [AI] model, impressive as it was, seemed like proof of concept for the models that would be coming soon, the models that could reliably do useful work on their own, the models that could make jobs obsolete or new things possible. . . .

I think the period in which we’re talking about the future is over now. The models we were waiting for — the sci-fi sounding models that could program on their own and do so faster and better than most coders, the models that could begin writing their own code to improve themselves — they are here now. . . .

Or, to put it differently, something that has been predicted for a long time has now happened: We are moving from chatbots to agents, from systems that talk to you to systems that act for you.

Anthropic introduced the first major AI agent, Claude Code, with OpenAI quickly following with its own coding agent, Codex. Coding involves the writing of sequences of instructions that computers can follow to perform tasks.  Previously, only skilled professionals who knew a programming language could write code. Now, with these agents, and the underlying work of large language models, anyone could code using a simple text-based prompt. And as might be expected, companies rushed to employ these agents, hoping they would enable their employees to write firm specific software for autonomously handling any number of common business tasks, including inventory management, payroll processing, and billing and delivery. 

READ AT THE LINK

Photo Credit: pixabay.com