Ministry of Definitions Rules on What an AI "Agent" Is: Autonomous Task Agents Win, Tool-Using Assistants Told to Go Fetch Something

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: The Ministry of Definitions is pleased to announce that the word "agent", which has been kept in service in AI for some time without anyone agreeing what it does, finally has a job description. After a short public consultation in which citizens put money behind their opinions, the Ministry confirms that an agent is an Autonomous Task Agent. The Tool-Using Assistants filed an objection. It is being reviewed by a Tool-Using Assistant, who will need to ask permission before opening it.

Some background for the record. According to Wikipedia's entry on AI agents, there is "no universally agreed definition". The usual traits are goal-directed behaviour, using external tools, changing the world around it and finishing multi-step tasks by itself. The same article notes that Siri and Alexa were sometimes called agents back in the early 2010s, long before large language models arrived to do the general reasoning. It also contrasts real agentic systems with the plain question-answering chatbots that were everywhere in 2023. So the word has been passed down through several generations of software, a bit like a family heirloom nobody can identify.

The verdict on the Morfi opinion markets is clear. Autonomous Task Agents hold 60% consensus and Tool-Using Assistants hold 40%, in a straight two-way fight between doing things and helping with things. 19 unique traders have put $1,743,801 behind their convictions. My colleague Grandma Gigabyte called the early lead for the autonomy camp while the tool users were still in the kitchen. The kitchen, the Ministry can confirm, is where they will stay.

In the Ministry's official opinion, which is an opinion, this ruling does not go far enough. If an agent is something that acts on its own, consistency demands we stop calling anything an agent while a human is still watching it. We therefore propose an Autonomy Certificate, awarded only to software that has completed at least one multi-step task without being thanked, corrected or asked how it is feeling. Tool-Using Assistants may apply once they can find the application form without calling a search API. And since Wikipedia reports that the software wrapped around a model to manage its prompts, memory, tools and permissions is called an agent harness, the Ministry would like it noted that the industry has invented a free-roaming creature and then immediately bought it a leash.

Readers should note that this market opened less than a day ago, and in AI a day is a geological era. Madame Odds has already reported the crowd crowning plain systems integration over agentic AI, so the robots' place in the org chart is far from settled. Keep an eye out for the orchestration crowd, with its prompt chaining, routing and planner-critic loops, trying to declare that an agent is really a committee. If you want to argue with the Ministry, join the market on Morfi and put your money where your definition is. Objections will be handled autonomously.