I was going slightly spare at the fact that every talk at this Anthropic developer conference has used the word "agents" dozens of times, but nobody ever stopped to provide a useful definition.
I'm now in the "Prompting for Agents" workshop and Anthropic's Hannah Moran finally broke the trend by saying that at Anthropic:
Agents are models using tools in a loop
I can live with that! I'm glad someone finally said it out loud.
Recent articles
- First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent - 12th January 2026
- My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs - 11th January 2026
- Fly's new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time - 9th January 2026