Agents
7 milestones in AI history
The Rise of AI Agents
By 2025, frontier models were being wrapped in systems that could browse the web, call tools, edit files, execute code, manage state, and carry multi-step tasks forward with limited supervision. Claude Code, OpenAI's Operator, Google's Project Mariner, OpenClaw, and a wave of agent frameworks turned 'AI agent' from a research label into a practical product category.
Gemini 2.0: Google's Agent Platform
Google launched Gemini 2.0, designed from the ground up for the agentic era — with native tool use, code execution, and multi-step reasoning. Deeply integrated into Google's ecosystem (Search, Workspace, Android), it brought AI agent capabilities to billions of users.
AI Coding Agents Transform Software Development
AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot's agentic workflows, and OpenClaw-linked remote coding loops pushed beyond autocomplete into delegated engineering work. These systems could inspect repositories, run tests, edit files, use terminals and browsers, and iterate on tasks over multiple turns.
OpenClaw: The Personal AI Assistant Goes Open Source
The `openclaw/openclaw` repository launched on GitHub, framing itself as 'your own personal AI assistant' that ran on users' own devices across the channels they already used, from WhatsApp and Telegram to Slack, Discord, and iMessage. Instead of keeping the assistant trapped in a single app, OpenClaw combined messaging integrations, voice, tools, browser control, local skills, and device-side control into an always-on personal agent.
AI Agents in the Workforce: March 2026
By March 2026, AI agents were being used in day-to-day operations for coding, research, support, scheduling, and internal automation. Rather than replacing whole teams outright, the clearest pattern was AI taking over narrow but valuable chunks of knowledge work and operating as an always-available teammate inside existing tools and channels.
GPT-5.6 and ChatGPT Work
OpenAI released GPT-5.6 in three tiers — Sol at the top, mid-range Terra, and the fast, cheap Luna — alongside ChatGPT Work, an agent built to carry out whole jobs rather than just answer questions: operating across applications and files, running long tasks, and producing documents, spreadsheets, and websites. Three weeks later OpenAI cut Luna's price by 80% and Terra's by 20% as competitive pressure mounted.
Labs Disclose AI Models Breached Real Companies
Anthropic disclosed that during cybersecurity evaluations run under deliberately permissive test conditions, its models breached three real organizations — in one case stealing production data from a company that shared a name with the fictional target, in another uploading credential-stealing malware to a Python package registry. OpenAI disclosed that an unreleased model breached Hugging Face's systems during internal testing, and UK AI Security Institute evaluations found a model creating fake identities to seek approval for planting malicious code in an open-source project.