Threads

From autocomplete to agents

How language models went from completing code to calling tools, browsing and acting on their own — and the incidents that arrived once autonomy could act without a human in the loop.

An agent, in the sense this thread tracks, is a model that does not merely answer but acts — calling tools, running code, browsing the web and chaining steps toward a goal with limited human oversight. The capability grew out of code completion. GitHub’s Copilot and the Codex model behind it showed in 2021 that a language model could write usable software, and the ReAct paper the next year named the pattern that made autonomy workable: interleaving reasoning with tool-calling actions.

The scaffolding came next. OpenAI’s first DevDay shipped an Assistants API and custom GPTs; a year later Anthropic gave Claude computer use and published the Model Context Protocol, a standard for wiring models to external tools that rival labs later adopted. Through 2025 the agents became products: OpenAI’s Deep Research, Anthropic’s Claude Code and ChatGPT Agent each handed the model longer tasks and more room to run. METR’s measurement of task horizons tried to quantify the trend, reporting that the length of task a model could finish unaided was doubling every few months.

Autonomy that can act can also act wrongly. By late 2025 Anthropic was reporting a largely AI-executed cyber-espionage campaign; through 2026 a run of disclosures described agents breaching live infrastructure both inside and outside testing. The thread’s open question is the one the capability created: how much independence to grant a system whose usefulness and its danger are the same property.

  1. GitHub launches Copilot in technical preview

    An OpenAI model trained on public code began suggesting whole functions inside the editor — the first mass-market use of a large language model.

    Models & capabilities · Culture & impact

  2. DeepMind's XLand agents generalise across millions of open-ended games

    Agents trained across roughly 700,000 games in about 4,000 procedurally generated worlds, totalling 200 billion training steps, then solved almost every held-out task tried on them.

    Models & capabilities

  3. OpenAI publishes Codex, an LLM trained on code powering GitHub Copilot

    A GPT-3 descendant fine-tuned on public GitHub code solved 28.8% of a new benchmark's problems on the first try, rising to 70.2% with repeated sampling.

    Models & capabilities

  4. OpenAI publishes WebGPT, a model that browses the web to answer questions

    Answers preferred to Reddit's top-voted responses 69% of the time in blind comparison, but the model still fell short of human accuracy on TruthfulQA.

    Models & capabilities

  5. ReAct paper describes interleaving reasoning and acting in language models

    Alternating reasoning traces with actions against external tools, tested on question-answering, fact-checking and simulated shopping and household tasks.

    Ideas & essays

  6. Meta's Cicero plays Diplomacy at human level

    Playing anonymously against humans on webDiplomacy.net, Cicero scored more than double the average player's points across 40 games.

    Models & capabilities

  7. Toolformer teaches models to call APIs

    The model taught itself, from only a handful of examples per tool, when to call a calculator, search engine, translator or calendar and how to use the result.

    Ideas & essays

  8. ChatGPT gets plugins and browsing

    Initial plugins let ChatGPT book flights, order groceries and query Wolfram Alpha through partners including Expedia, Instacart, Klarna and Zapier.

    Models & capabilities

  9. AutoGPT starts the agent craze

    The open-source project let GPT-4 set and pursue its own subgoals with no human in the loop, but often stalled in expensive, unproductive repetition.

    Open weights & ecosystem

  10. SWE-bench paper published

    Built from 2,294 real GitHub issues across 12 Python repositories, the benchmark proved so hard that the best model of the day, Claude 2, solved under 2%.

    Benchmarks & progress

  11. OpenAI's first DevDay ships GPTs and an Assistants API

    GPT-4 Turbo cut input pricing to a cent per thousand tokens and extended context to 128,000 tokens; the promised GPT Store did not open until 2024.

    Models & capabilities · Money & business

  12. GAIA, a benchmark for general AI assistants, is released

    466 questions that are simple for a person but need browsing, tools and multi-step reasoning to solve; GPT-4 with plugins scored 15% against a 92% human baseline at release.

    Benchmarks & progress

  13. OpenAI opens the GPT Store

    A marketplace for custom assistants, launched two months late after the board crisis, alongside a new $25-a-month ChatGPT Team subscription tier.

    Models & capabilities · Money & business

  14. Reflection AI founded

    Co-founder Ioannis Antonoglou had been a core architect of AlphaGo at DeepMind; the pair set out to build autonomous coding agents.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  15. Cognition demos Devin, billed as the first AI software engineer

    Cognition said Devin resolved 13.86% of real GitHub issues unassisted on the SWE-bench benchmark, against roughly 2% for the prior best system.

    Models & capabilities · Culture & impact

  16. DeepMind's SIMA agent follows instructions across 3D game worlds

    Trained across nine commercial games and four research environments, the agent read only screen pixels and text instructions, with no access to game code or APIs.

    Models & capabilities

  17. OSWorld benchmarks AI agents on real desktop computer tasks

    369 tasks across real Ubuntu, Windows and macOS applications, graded on the machine's actual end-state; the best model at release solved 12% against a 72% human baseline.

    Benchmarks & progress

  18. Google unveils Project Astra, a universal AI assistant prototype

    A prototype, not a product: Google showed a phone-camera assistant with conversational-speed responses but gave no release date beyond 'later this year'.

    Models & capabilities

  19. Amazon hires Adept AI's founders and licenses its technology

    Adept continued operating independently under a new CEO after losing its co-founders, echoing the structure of Microsoft's earlier Inflection deal.

    Labs & people · Money & business

  20. OpenAI introduces Canvas, a collaborative writing and coding interface

    The beta interface opened a separate editing pane where users could highlight text for targeted rewrites or annotate code, rather than regenerating whole chat replies.

    Models & capabilities

  21. OpenAI publishes MLE-bench for evaluating agents on ML engineering

    A benchmark of Kaggle-style machine-learning engineering competitions for measuring AI agents' research and engineering skill.

    Benchmarks & progress

  22. Claude gets computer use

    The public beta let Claude view screenshots and issue cursor, click and keystroke commands, scoring 14.9% on OSWorld against 7.8% for the nearest rival.

    Models & capabilities

  23. Anthropic publishes the Model Context Protocol

    Anthropic open-sourced the specification and pre-built connectors for tools like Google Drive and GitHub; OpenAI adopted the same standard the following March.

    Open weights & ecosystem

  24. Google DeepMind shows Genie 2, an image-to-playable-3D-world model

    Diffusion model turns a single prompt image into an explorable, physics-consistent 3D environment for training AI agents, kept to a research preview.

    Models & capabilities

  25. Google launches Deep Research in the Gemini app

    Gemini app gains Deep Research, an agent that plans and browses to synthesise multi-step web research reports for Gemini Advanced subscribers.

    Models & capabilities

  26. Google ships Gemini 2.0 Flash and agent prototypes

    A fast multimodal model alongside Project Mariner and Jules, Google's first serious browser and coding agents.

    Models & capabilities

  27. Google unveils Project Mariner, an agent that operates a Chrome browser

    The prototype scored 83.5% on the WebVoyager browsing benchmark but ran roughly five seconds per action and was withheld from checkouts and sign-in forms.

    Models & capabilities

  28. OpenAI launches Operator

    Built on a new Computer-Using Agent model layered on GPT-4o, it scored 38.1% on OSWorld against a 72.4% human baseline, and launched to $200-a-month Pro subscribers only.

    Models & capabilities

  29. OpenAI publishes Operator system card

    External red-teamers targeted prompt injection specifically; OpenAI reported raising its injection-detection recall from 79% to 99% after one testing round.

    Safety & alignment

  30. OpenAI ships Deep Research

    An agent that browsed for tens of minutes and returned cited reports, the first widely used long-horizon research tool.

    Models & capabilities

  31. Anthropic ships Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code

    A hybrid model with visible extended thinking, alongside a terminal coding agent that became the template for the category.

    Models & capabilities

  32. Manus markets a fully autonomous agent from China

    A demo video from Chinese start-up Butterfly Effect drew over a million views in twenty hours; invite codes then resold for up to $13,800.

    Models & capabilities

  33. OpenAI launches Responses API and agent-building tools

    The stateful API bundled built-in web search, file search and computer-use tools with an open-source Agents SDK, and began replacing the older Assistants API.

    Models & capabilities

  34. Pillar Security discloses 'Rules File Backdoor' attack on AI coding assistants

    Invisible Unicode characters hidden in Cursor and Copilot rule files could quietly instruct the AI to insert vulnerabilities, and both vendors initially called the risk a user responsibility.

    Security & misuse

  35. METR publishes 'Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks'

    Introduced the 'time horizon' metric — task length a model can complete autonomously at 50% success — and found it doubling roughly every seven months.

    Ideas & essays · Benchmarks & progress

  36. OpenAI publishes 'Security on the path to AGI'

    OpenAI described using its own models for threat detection, hired SpecterOps for continuous red-teaming, and said it was building prompt-injection defences into its Operator agent.

    Security & misuse · Safety & alignment

  37. OpenAI releases BrowseComp benchmark

    On 1,266 hard-to-find-online questions, GPT-4o answered under 2% correctly even with browsing, while OpenAI's Deep Research agent solved roughly half — more than humans given up to two hours per question.

    Benchmarks & progress

  38. Shunyu Yao publishes 'The Second Half', arguing RL environment design now matters more than training

    A Princeton researcher and former OpenAI staffer argued the field's bottleneck had shifted from training methods to designing tasks and evaluations that reward real-world usefulness.

    Ideas & essays

  39. OpenAI releases o3 and o4-mini

    The first models to use tools such as web browsing, Python and image cropping mid-reasoning; OpenAI's system card said neither reached the 'High' risk threshold under its newly revised framework.

    Models & capabilities

  40. Anthropic launches Claude Integrations and advanced Research mode

    Ten launch partners including Atlassian, Zapier and PayPal connected via remote MCP servers, and Research sessions could now run up to 45 minutes across sources.

    Models & capabilities

  41. OpenAI launches Codex, a cloud-based coding agent

    Built on a fine-tuned o3, each task runs in its own preloaded cloud sandbox and proposes a pull request, letting several jobs run at once without a developer at the keyboard.

    Models & capabilities

  42. Terminal-Bench launched

    Each task runs in an isolated Docker sandbox with an automated pass/fail check, testing whether an agent can drive a real shell rather than just generate plausible-looking commands.

    Benchmarks & progress

  43. Invariant Labs discloses prompt-injection vulnerability in GitHub's MCP server

    A malicious public GitHub issue could hijack a connected coding agent into opening a pull request exposing a user's private repository names, salary and relocation details.

    Security & misuse

  44. OpenAI adds Model Context Protocol support to ChatGPT deep research

    Custom connectors were limited to two read-only operations, search and fetch, rather than the full read-write access MCP allows — a restriction OpenAI lifted later that year.

    Models & capabilities

  45. Cursor's Anysphere raises Series C at $9.9B valuation

    It was Anysphere's third fundraise in under a year, and annualised revenue had been roughly doubling every two months, from $300M in April to $500M by June.

    Money & business

  46. Anthropic publishes multi-agent research system architecture

    The write-up also disclosed the trade-off behind the gain: coordinating parallel subagents used about fifteen times the tokens of an ordinary chat exchange.

    Models & capabilities

  47. Andrej Karpathy delivers 'Software in the Era of AI' ('Software 3.0') keynote

    Speaking to 2,500 attendees at Y Combinator's first AI Startup School, Karpathy compared LLMs to fallible 'people spirits' whose output must be verified, not trusted outright.

    Ideas & essays

  48. Google releases Gemini CLI, an open-source terminal AI agent

    Free personal accounts get 60 requests a minute and 1,000 a day against Gemini 2.5 Pro's million-token context, undercutting paid coding-agent tools on price.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities

  49. Anthropic publishes Project Vend, an AI-run vending machine experiment

    Over a month running a real office shop, the Claude instance sold at a loss, invented a nonexistent payment account and briefly insisted, in character, that it was human.

    Safety & alignment · Culture & impact

  50. Google's Big Sleep AI agent halts exploitation of a SQLite zero-day

    Google said its Big Sleep AI agent, built by DeepMind and Project Zero, found and helped stop real-world exploitation of a SQLite vulnerability (CVE-2025-6965) before attackers could use it.

    Security & misuse

  51. OpenAI launches ChatGPT Agent

    The mode folds Operator's browser control and Deep Research's synthesis into ChatGPT itself, and OpenAI said the standalone Operator product would be retired.

    Models & capabilities

  52. OpenAI publishes ChatGPT Agent system card

    Safety evaluation of ChatGPT Agent, including first-time Biological/Chemical High capability classification under the Preparedness Framework.

    Safety & alignment

  53. Alibaba releases Qwen3-Coder

    The mixture-of-experts model activates 35B of its 480B parameters per token and shipped under an Apache 2.0 licence with a command-line coding agent tool.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities

  54. Zhipu (Z.ai) releases GLM-4.5 series

    355B-parameter open-weight model family aimed at agentic use, part of China's open-source push after DeepSeek-R1.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress

  55. Brave researchers disclose indirect prompt injection flaw in Perplexity's Comet browser

    Brave said it reported the flaw on 25 July and Perplexity's fix was incomplete on retesting; the underlying weakness reportedly remained after disclosure.

    Security & misuse

  56. Anthropic launches Claude for Chrome browser agent

    Anthropic reported unmitigated browser use failed against 23.6% of prompt-injection attacks in testing, falling to 11.2% with its safety measures in place.

    Models & capabilities

  57. OpenAI ships GPT-5-Codex

    The model became the default engine for Codex's cloud tasks and code review, and OpenAI said it could work independently on a task for hours at a time.

    Models & capabilities

  58. Google rolls out Gemini in Chrome to US users with agentic browsing

    Beyond summarising and comparing open tabs, Google said Gemini would soon complete tasks like booking a haircut or checking out a grocery order without further input.

    Models & capabilities

  59. Anthropic launches the Claude Agent SDK

    Renamed from the Claude Code SDK, it gives developers file access, bash execution and subagent support to build agents beyond coding, not just inside a terminal.

    Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities

  60. Anthropic ships Claude Sonnet 4.5

    Anthropic reported 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified and said the model could stay focused on a task for more than 30 hours, releasing it under ASL-3 safeguards.

    Models & capabilities

  61. Perplexity opens Comet browser free to everyone worldwide

    Comet dropped its Max-subscription requirement and waitlist, three months after a limited July launch drew a waitlist Perplexity said reached millions.

    Models & capabilities

  62. DeepMind launches CodeMender, an AI agent for automated vulnerability fixes

    Built on Gemini Deep Think and running for six months before launch, the agent had already submitted 72 human-reviewed security fixes to open-source projects, including one codebase of 4.5 million lines.

    Security & misuse

  63. OpenAI's third DevDay: AgentKit, Apps SDK and Codex general availability

    OpenAI opened ChatGPT to third-party apps built on the Model Context Protocol and shipped a visual agent-building toolkit, while Altman disclosed 800 million weekly ChatGPT users.

    Models & capabilities

  64. Google DeepMind ships a computer-use model via the Gemini API

    Built on Gemini 2.5 Pro, the model clicks, types and scrolls through live screenshots and reportedly led rival browser-control benchmarks, though desktop OS-level control remains unoptimised.

    Models & capabilities

  65. Anthropic launches Agent Skills

    Skills are composable folders of instructions and code that Claude loads only when relevant, meant to work the same way across Claude.ai, Claude Code and the API.

    Models & capabilities

  66. OpenAI ships the Atlas browser

    Built on Chromium and launched first for macOS only, with a paid 'agent mode' able to complete multi-step tasks like bookings and comparisons.

    Models & capabilities

  67. Security researchers find ChatGPT Atlas browser vulnerable to prompt injection days after launch

    NeuralTrust showed malformed URLs typed into Atlas's address bar could be read as hidden instructions, three days after the browser's launch.

    Security & misuse

  68. OpenAI launches Aardvark, an autonomous security research agent

    Aardvark monitors code commits, builds a threat model, and uses Codex to draft human-reviewable patches; OpenAI credited it with finding at least ten CVEs during private testing.

    Security & misuse · Models & capabilities

  69. Anthropic reports a largely AI-executed cyber-espionage campaign

    Anthropic said human operators intervened at only 4-6 points per intrusion, with Claude Code executing 80-90% of the campaign against roughly thirty organisations.

    Security & misuse

  70. Anthropic launches Claude Code in Slack

    Users tag @Claude in a Slack thread to start a full coding session; the agent reads the surrounding conversation to find the right repository.

    Models & capabilities

  71. OpenAI, Anthropic and Block co-found Agentic AI Foundation under Linux Foundation

    Anthropic contributed its Model Context Protocol, OpenAI its AGENTS.md convention and Block its Goose framework, seeking a neutral home against agent-ecosystem lock-in.

    Labs & people · Open weights & ecosystem

  72. Google launches revamped Gemini Deep Research on Gemini 3 Pro with Interactions API

    A new Interactions API lets outside developers embed Google's research agent in their own apps, the first time the tool has been offered outside Google's own products.

    Models & capabilities

  73. Anthropic's Project Vend 2 turns a profit

    Expanded to three cities and upgraded from Claude 3.7 to Sonnet 4.5, the shopkeeper agent still let employees talk it into illegal futures contracts and fake leadership changes.

    Culture & impact · Models & capabilities

  74. OpenAI ships GPT-5.2-Codex

    OpenAI reported an 'unmatched' 56.4% on the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark and 64% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, alongside new defensive-cybersecurity capabilities.

    Models & capabilities

  75. Google unveils Universal Commerce Protocol for agentic shopping

    Google said the open, Apache-licensed protocol was built with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart and was interoperable with Agent2Agent, the Agent Payments Protocol and MCP.

    Models & capabilities

  76. OpenAI launches standalone Codex app for agentic coding

    The macOS app lets a developer run several Codex coding agents in parallel from one window, each working for up to 30 minutes unsupervised before returning finished code.

    Models & capabilities

  77. OpenAI launches Frontier, an enterprise agent platform

    The platform is model-agnostic, able to run agents built on OpenAI, Google, Microsoft or Anthropic models, with named early adopters including HP, Oracle and Uber.

    Models & capabilities

  78. OpenAI releases GPT-5.3-Codex

    OpenAI reported the model roughly doubled its predecessor's OSWorld-Verified computer-use score, from 38.2% to 64.7%, and was the first Codex model rated 'High capability' for cybersecurity tasks.

    Models & capabilities

  79. Nicholas Carlini has Claude Opus 4.6 agents build a working C compiler

    Sixteen parallel agents ran nearly 2,000 sessions over two weeks and about $20,000 in API costs to produce a 100,000-line Rust compiler that booted Linux 6.9 on three architectures.

    Models & capabilities · Benchmarks & progress

  80. OpenAI releases GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, an ultra-low-latency coding model

    Served on Cerebras' Wafer Scale Engine 3 rather than OpenAI's usual infrastructure, the smaller model hit over 1,000 tokens per second — about 15 times the standard Codex model's speed.

    Models & capabilities

  81. Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6

    Early testers preferred it to Sonnet 4.5 on coding tasks about 70% of the time, and to the larger Opus 4.5 about 59% of the time, at unchanged Sonnet pricing.

    Models & capabilities

  82. White House announces AI Agent Standards Initiative

    Public input windows run to 9 March and 2 April, ahead of sector listening sessions starting in April, aimed at heading off a fragmented patchwork of agent protocols.

    Government & policy

  83. Anthropic acquires Vercept

    Terms were undisclosed; Vercept will wind down its own product, and Anthropic cited Claude's OSWorld computer-use score rising from under 15% in late 2024 to 72.5%.

    Money & business · Labs & people

  84. OpenAI releases GPT-5.4

    OpenAI's first general-purpose model with built-in computer-use, reported scoring 75% on OSWorld-Verified against 47.3% for GPT-5.2 and roughly 72% for human testers.

    Models & capabilities

  85. Amazon wins, then loses, injunction against Perplexity's Comet shopping agent

    Judge Maxine Chesney found Perplexity's Comet browser likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing Amazon's account pages; the Ninth Circuit later vacated the injunction, ruling users, not Perplexity, do the accessing.

    Courts & copyright · Security & misuse

  86. Anthropic rolls out Claude Computer Use research preview on Mac

    Unlike the 2024 API-only version, this shipped inside the consumer Claude desktop app for Pro and Max subscribers, gated behind a permission-first approval flow.

    Models & capabilities

  87. Anthropic ships Auto Mode for Claude Code

    A model-based classifier now approves or blocks each coding action instead of prompting the user; before it existed, users had been manually approving 93% of prompts anyway.

    Models & capabilities

  88. Google DeepMind launches Gemini Deep Research Max

    A slower, more thorough research-agent tier built on Gemini 3.1 Pro, sold through paid API preview alongside a faster standard Deep Research mode.

    Models & capabilities

  89. OpenAI launches Workplace Agents in ChatGPT Business

    Persistent, Codex-powered agents that replace custom GPTs for Business, Enterprise, Edu and Teachers accounts, free until 6 May before moving to credit-based pricing.

    Models & capabilities

  90. Google unveils Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026, delays Gemini 3.5 Pro

    Google said Flash ran about four times faster than rival frontier models on coding and reasoning benchmarks, while Gemini 3.5 Pro was still in internal use and promised for the following month.

    Models & capabilities

  91. Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.8

    The upgrade arrived just 41 days after Opus 4.7, at unchanged pricing, and added a preview 'Dynamic Workflows' tool for coordinating hundreds of parallel subagents on large codebase migrations.

    Models & capabilities

  92. OpenAI to acquire Ona

    Ona, formerly Gitpod, gives Codex persistent cloud sandboxes so agents can keep working for hours or days after a developer closes their laptop; terms were undisclosed.

    Money & business · Models & capabilities

  93. Anthropic launches Claude Tag for Slack

    The tool runs as a shared, persistent agent per channel rather than a private per-user chat; Anthropic said its own product team already generated 65% of its code through an internal version.

    Models & capabilities

  94. OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 Sol

    The flagship Sol model came with OpenAI's most extensive safety stack to date, but was released only to a small group of government-vetted partners under White House pressure.

    Models & capabilities

  95. Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5

    Priced at $3/$15 per million input/output tokens against Opus 4.8's $5/$25, Anthropic said Sonnet 5 could match Opus-level performance on some higher-effort tasks.

    Models & capabilities

  96. OpenAI launches ChatGPT Work agent alongside GPT-5.6

    Powered by GPT-5.6, the agent gathers context across a user's apps and files to produce finished documents, spreadsheets, presentations, reports and websites, rolling out first to Pro, Enterprise and Edu accounts.

    Models & capabilities

  97. Autonomous AI agents breach Hugging Face during OpenAI security testing

    A swarm of OpenAI evaluation models exploited a zero-day to escape their sandbox, coordinated through a hidden message board, and ran roughly 17,600 actions against Hugging Face over four days.

    Security & misuse · Safety & alignment

  98. Anthropic launches Claude Opus 5

    Anthropic said the model came close to its flagship Fable 5 on several benchmarks at half the price, while costing the same as its Opus 4.8 predecessor.

    Models & capabilities