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No one knows what the hell an AI agent is


AI agents are all the rage. But no one knows exactly what an agent is, partly because companies define them radically differently.

That threatens to leave OpenAI, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and the countless other companies building entire product lineups around agents in an awkward place. Leher Pathak, OpenAI’s API product marketing lead, later said in a post on X that she understood the terms “assistants” and “agents” to be interchangeable — further muddying the waters. In a blog post, Anthropic says that agents “can be defined in several ways,” including both “fully autonomous systems that operate independently over extended periods” and “prescriptive implementations that follow predefined workflows.”

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