Demos of AI agents can seem stunning, but getting the technology to perform reliably and without annoying (or costly) errors in real life can be a challenge. Current models can answer questions and converse with almost humanlike skill, and are the backbone of chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. They can also perform tasks on computers when given a simple command by accessing the computer screen as well as input devices like a keyboard and trackpad, or through low-level software interfaces.
Anthropic says that Claude outperforms other AI agents on several key benchmarks including SWE-bench, which measures an agent’s software development skills, and OSWorld, which gauges an agent’s capacity to use a computer operating system. The claims have yet to be independently verified. Anthropic says Claude performs tasks in OSWorld correctly 14.9 percent of the time. This is well below humans, who generally score around 75 percent, but considerably higher than the current best agents—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—which succeed roughly 7.7 percent of the time.
Anthropic claims that several companies are already testing the agentic version of Claude. This includes Canva, which is using it to automate design and editing tasks, and Replit, which uses the model for coding chores. Other early users include The Browser Company, Asana, and Notion.
Ofir Press, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University who helped develop SWE-bench, says that agentic AI tends to lack the ability to plan far ahead and often struggles to recover from errors. “In order to show them to be useful we must obtain strong performance on tough and realistic benchmarks,” he says, such as reliably planning a wide range of trips for a user and booking all the necessary tickets.
Kaplan notes that Claude can already troubleshoot some errors surprisingly well. When faced with a terminal error when trying to start a web server, for instance, the model knew how to revise its command to fix it. It also worked out that it had to enable popups when it ran into a dead end browsing the web.
Many tech companies are now racing to develop AI agents as they chase market share and prominence. In fact, it might not be long before many users have agents at their fingertips. Microsoft, which has poured upwards of $13 billion into OpenAI, says it is testing agents that can use Windows computers. Amazon, which has invested heavily in Anthropic, is exploring how agents could recommend and eventually buy goods for its customers.
Sonya Huang, a partner at the venture firm Sequoia who focuses on AI companies, says for all the excitement around AI agents, most companies are really just rebranding AI-powered tools. Speaking to WIRED ahead of the Anthropic news, she says that the technology works best currently when applied in narrow domains such as coding-related work. “You need to choose problem spaces where if the model fails, that’s okay,” she says. “Those are the problem spaces where truly agent native companies will arise.”
A key challenge with agentic AI is that errors can be far more problematic than a garble chatbot reply. Anthropic has imposed certain constraints on what Claude can do—for example, limiting its ability to use a person’s credit card to buy stuff.
If errors can be avoided well enough, says Press of Princeton University, users might learn to see AI—and computers—in a completely new way. “I’m super excited about this new era,” he says.
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