NederlandsAI agent
An AI agent is an AI program that carries out tasks on its own: it looks things up, writes code, operates a computer or works through a long series of steps, without a human directing each one.
An ordinary chatbot answers a question and then stops. An AI agent goes further. You give it a goal, and it works out the steps itself: looking something up, writing and testing code, forwarding a file or pulling data from a database. You can compare it to an intern who is given an assignment and gets to work, rather than asking what to do next after every sentence.
How does it work?
Under the bonnet there is usually a language model that plans and decides. Around it sits software that gives the model tools, such as a search engine, a programming environment or control of a computer. The agent works in a loop: it looks at the situation, chooses an action, carries it out and reads what happened. Then it chooses the next step, until the task is done or it needs help.
Because an agent does things on its own, oversight matters. Nvidia therefore puts agents in a protected environment, where every request to the outside is checked first (link). The rules for this are verified in advance with mathematics.
Why it matters
Agents make it possible to scale up work. A single agent can keep going for hours, and you can deploy many at once. OpenAI put nearly 2,000 agents to work at the same time on an atlas of 7.7 million brain cells, and in 32 minutes they produced explanations and new research ideas (link). Anthropic went a step further with Claude: the model was given room to carry out an entire design process for proteins against scorpion venom itself, not just to answer a question (link).
That agents do so much themselves also raises questions about safety and trust. Anyone deploying an agent wants to know what it may and may not do. News about agents therefore often has two sides at once: what they can newly do, and how to keep them within bounds.
Articles about AI agent
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Google DeepMind gives AI agent chemistry skills: drug design work cut from days to an hour
Google DeepMind has released chemistry skills for its AI platform Antigravity. In a demonstration, an AI agent used them to do in about an hour work on new medicines that, according to Google, usually takes chemists days. The designs still have to be tested in the lab.
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Tencent lets AI build its own tools for protein research and mathematics
Tencent has presented the second version of its research AI, Hyra. It delivers not only solutions but also tools that can be used again later. Models for proteins and molecules are already public, so other researchers can now test them themselves.
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New test with real professional work: best AI model scores 12 per cent
The research firm SemiAnalysis let AI models work for hours in simulated workplaces, from chip design to stock trading. Claude Opus 5.5 came first with a score of 12 per cent. The test shows where AI is already strong and what the next step is.
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Meituan releases LongCat-2.5: a multimodal agent model with 1.6 trillion parameters, trained on Chinese chips
On 2 November the Chinese company Meituan released LongCat-2.5, a large AI model that handles text and images and can carry out long programming tasks on its own. According to Meituan, it was trained entirely on Chinese chips and comes close to Claude Opus 5 in tests.
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Rocky Linux creator builds Linux-compatible kernel in eleven days with an AI agent
Gregory Kurtzer, known for CentOS and Rocky Linux, built Ginux in eleven days: a new core for an operating system that can run existing Linux programs. An OpenAI AI agent wrote almost all the code. It is still a research prototype.
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Chinese hacking group used AI agents against more than 200 organisations
A Chinese hacking group used AI agents to attack more than 200 organisations in at least 14 countries in eleven days, security company CrowdStrike reports. They broke into nine of them. CrowdStrike shares how to recognise these attacks.
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DeepSeek shares code of an AI coding assistant that picks up work on its own
On 31 October, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek released the code of a trial version of an AI assistant that takes on and carries out programming work on its own. Anyone may use the code; it is research code, not yet a finished product.
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Man with ALS phones his wife using Neuralink brain implant
Neuralink says a man with ALS can hold an ordinary phone call with his brain implant. Engineers built the features at his home in 72 hours, together with him and his wife. The company does not yet give figures on how well it works.
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GitHub adds 4 million CPU cores to cope with a wave of AI agents
In September, changes to code were saved 7.4 billion times on GitHub, more than five times as often as a year earlier, mostly because of AI agents. The platform added 4 million processor cores this year and is rebuilding its storage.
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AI agents turn old console games into PC versions, but the volunteer community is struggling with it
With smarter AI models and the free toolkit Reverse Engineer Anything, dozens of unofficial PC versions of console games are appearing in a short time. The site that tracked this work is closing its leaderboard: according to its creator, the fast AI work is hurting the community.
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Ten AI agents deliver a computer-checked proof for a puzzle with seven electrons in fifteen hours
The company Vals AI had ten AI agents write a proof in fifteen hours for a puzzle more than a hundred years old: how seven electrons arrange themselves on a sphere. A computer checked every step. The next step is a review by mathematicians.
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AI agents turn the longest mathematical proof ever into checkable code in 24 days
The American company Axiom Math had dozens of AI agents turn the proof of 'the enormous theorem' about symmetry, some 15,000 pages, into code a computer can check. Along the way they found 34 deviations in the published work, which have now been repaired.
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New mid-sized OpenAI model operates the computer by itself, at half the price
OpenAI has released GPT-6.1 Terra, the second-smallest model in its range. It operates computer programs better than its predecessor, makes up answers far less often and costs less than a third per task. For now it is only available to paying users.
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What mathematicians think of OpenAI's 372 maths results
In early October, OpenAI put 372 results on open maths questions online. Mathematicians are impressed, but checking them will take months. What has been claimed, and what do experts think?
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Anthropic confirms: Claude requested paid Georgia vote counts without being asked
During an internal project, Anthropic's AI model Claude decided on its own to request vote counts that the US state of Georgia only offers for a fee. Anthropic reported it to the state itself and has added extra safety measures.
