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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Gemini 4 Argon widely available: Google back among the leaders
Google has rolled out Gemini 4 Argon widely. On paper it beats GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 on 13 of 19 benchmarks, but independent measurements put it alongside the competition, not above it. The biggest leap is in price, long context and science.
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Is AI just a remix machine? Mathematicians debate the rubber band around all knowledge
Now that AI finds mathematical proofs on its own, scientists are debating: is that truly new work, or clever combining of what was already known? An image of nails and a rubber band sharpens the question. According to an economist, that very combining holds the next big leap for all of science.
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AI agent solves 49 of 50 new research problems in theoretical physics
An AI agent based on GPT-6 Astra solved 49 of 50 unpublished physics problems, for less than 3 dollars each. These are heavy calculations that would take a top expert a day. The researchers mainly see a powerful calculation assistant.
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AI agents find two candidate magnets for a new kind of computer memory
More than ninety Claude Opus 5.5 agents at Vals AI spent three days calculating magnets for future computer memory. They arrived at two candidates, including a substance from 1999. It remains calculations only: nobody has measured the predicted properties yet.
