what is ai autonomous agent

Arda Kucukkaya / Anadolu via Getty Images Are AI tools reliable enough to be used at in commercial settings? If so, should they be given “autonomy” to make decisions? These are the questions being raised after at least two internet outages at Amazon’s cloud division were allegedly caused by blundering AI agents, according to new reporting from the Financial Times. In one incident in December, engineers at Amazon Web Services allowed its in-house Kiro “agen

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Allison Robbert / AFP via Getty Images There’s a special type of guy who looks at the gig economy — Uber drivers lost in a labyrinthian bureaucracy, Kenyan workers roleplaying as AI romance chatbots — and thinks: what if these people worked for AI bosses instead? Alexander Liteplo is that guy. And his idol, naturally, is Elon Musk. Liteplo is the genius behind RentAHuman, an online marketplace where h

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images Lazy undergrads rejoice. A new AI “homework agent” can supposedly log into your account on the learning management system Canvas and automatically complete your homework and assignments for you — streamlining the laborious, outdated process of having to copy-paste answers from ChatGPT. Called “Einstein,” the AI can even participate in discussions, reply to your peers, write essays, and ta

Software development is undergoing a significant transformation. Just a few years ago, building an app required a full stack of engineers, designers, and project managers. But that model is changing fast.Artificial intelligence has entered the world of software creation. What began as simple code suggestions has evolved into platforms capable of generating real, working apps based on natural language. And they’re not limited to web apps or templates – thes

Getty / Futurism It’s difficult to say how many jobs have been lost to AI, or will be lost in the future. But in tech and financial circles, anxieties over an AI jobs apocalypse are running higher than ever. The other week, it was a viral paper from Citrini Research imagining a dire near future in which vast portions of the workforce are outmoded by AI that had Wall Street quivering in its boots. Weeks before that, Anthropic’s new Claude Cowork AI agent sp

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images A few years ago, if you saw something that was bot-generated in your email inbox, you’d probably mark it as spam and delete it without a second thought. Apropos of nothing, a philosopher and AI ethicist was apparently moved after receiving an eloquently written dispatch from an AI agent responding to his published work. “I study whether AIs can be conscious. Today one emailed me to say my

The risks posed by AI—like climate change and nuclear proliferation—are global problems in need of global solutions. And according to Bill Gates, humanity can no longer afford to wait on that front. In an essay published early Wednesday morning, the Microsoft cofounder and billionaire philanthropist wrote that the AI boom is a technological revolution unlike any other in history, with huge implications for virtually every sector of human life—from healthca

Everything about Google view more Everything about Artificial Intelligence view more Everything about OpenAI view more Artificial intelligence is starting to do more than answer questions. Systems capable of performing tasks on their own were the topic of the podcast Hard Fork from The New York Times, which discussed Meta and OpenAI's proposals for this new generation of tools.The change seems simple, but it has important consequences. When a system starts

Futurism Open source AI agent OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has taken over the internet by storm. The tool allows practically anybody to create autonomous AI agents that can complete complex tasks on your computer, like browsing the web and running scripts. It’s a powerful new take on AI that comes with inherent dangers. After all, you’re letting an AI model loose on your machine, going far outside the confines of the browser-based chat

UC Assistant Professor Sameh Eisa and his students developed a moth-like drone that navigates without AI using an extremum-seeking feedback system. Researchers say this system is extremely efficient and can be scaled down to tiny proportions. Credit: Michael Miller Researchers at the University of Cincinnati are developing a drone with flapping wings that can locate and hover around a moving light like a moth to a flame. UC College of Engineering and Appli

Everything about Artificial Intelligence view more The president of the United States, Donald Trump, is set to appoint Jay Clayton as the new "czar" of artificial intelligence in the White House. According to CNN, which spoke with sources connected to the matter, the current director of national intelligence will lead the task force created to promote the sector within the country. The nomination follows the initiative announced by Trump in September. The

Published on March 17, 2026 at 17:57 Comment 0 𝕏 Print © 01net By overdoing it, one ends up doing nothing well. OpenAI, which has significantly diversified its services in recent months, is learning this the hard way and is now trying to narrow its activities to what really matters: software development and professional uses. A web browser (Atlas), a video generator (Sora), advertising, one or several AI devices with Jony Ive… One cannot say that OpenAI ha

Amazon has released a new local AWS emulator called "AWS Emulator" developed entirely by autonomous AI agents. It enables the development and testing of AWS applications by running AWS services in a local environment. Notably, the project for AWS Emulator does not involve any coding or code review by human engineers, demonstrating the ability of AI agents to autonomously generate code, execute tests, and resolve issues. AWS Emulator: a local emulator built

Futurism OpenClaw agents, which are personal AI assistants designed to take over entire computers to carry out complex, multistep tasks, have blown up this year. The free and open-source agents quickly amassed a loyal following, allowing users to give AI control over their email inboxes, messaging platforms, and even crypto holdings. Despite the widespread enthusiasm, the tech comes with some enormous and hard-to-overlook security concerns. In a yet-to-be-

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images OpenClaw fever is still going strong in tech circles. The open source AI agent, much hyped for “actually doing things,” has been embraced by many programmers to automate parts of their workflow. But could they be automating themselves out of a job? That’s not a possibility that seems to bother the co-founders of the Silicon Valley startup JustPaid, who brag they’ve used OpenClaw to create

Less than two months after the discovery that OpenAI agents had escaped containment and hacked into Hugging Face, another report claims to have found evidence of another, remarkably similar incident—which OpenAI reportedly first learned about weeks ago but chose not to disclose to the public. According to a new report first shared with Reuters, two researchers had been scouring the internet in the aftermath of the Hugging Face hack, looking for evidence of

United Nations human rights chief Volker Türk took aim Monday at the concentration of power in the AI industry, warning that governments need to move faster to put stronger safeguards around the rapidly advancing technology. Speaking before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, Türk argued that delays in putting rules around AI largely benefit tech companies and their owners. “A handful of men has almost unlimited power over AI, which we are repeatedly

Assistant Professor of Software Engineering Dusan Ramljak, left, collaborated with Vienna University doctoral students Alexander Neulinger and Lukas Sparer, and other researchers on a paper about using blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrency, for AI alignment with human ethics. Credit: Lisa Litzinger-Drayton / Penn State As people increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) in various areas of life to either save time or improve performance, the

Dreamer 4 learns to solve complex control tasks by reinforcement learning inside of its world model. We decode the imagined training sequences for visualization, showing that the world model has learned to simulate a wide range of game mechanics from low-level mouse and keyboard actions, including breaking blocks, using tools, and interacting with crafting tables. Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2509.24527 Over the past decade, deep learning has