{"id":339227,"date":"2025-12-09T15:52:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T15:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/339227\/"},"modified":"2025-12-09T15:52:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T15:52:15","slug":"anthropic-researchers-say-more-ai-agents-isnt-the-answer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/339227\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic Researchers Say More AI Agents Isn’t the Answer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The tech industry has spent the past year racing to build AI agents<\/a>, but Anthropic researchers say a simpler idea can make AI more effective on the job.<\/p>\n

Barry Zhang and Mahesh Murag said at the AI Engineering Code Summit last month that the real breakthrough for agent workflow isn’t more agents, but “agent skills.”<\/p>\n

“We used to think agents in different domains will look very different,” Zhang said in a clip of the talk published Monday. “The agent underneath is actually more universal than we thought.”<\/p>\n

Instead of building new agents for every use case, companies should rely on a single general agent powered by a library of skills, Zhang said.<\/p>\n

Skills are “organized collections of files that package composable procedural knowledge for agents,” Zhang said. They are simply folders that contain whatever an agent needs to complete a task consistently and efficiently.<\/p>\n

Despite their intelligence, Zhang said today’s agents “lack expertise” and often miss important context in real-world use cases. Skills help fill in those gaps by giving agents domain knowledge and reusable workflows.<\/p>\n

Murag said Anthropic has already seen skills built by people in accounting, legal, recruiting, and other non-technical roles. In the five weeks since launch, users have created thousands of these skills, and large companies are starting to treat them like internal playbooks for AI, he added.<\/p>\n

Fortune 100 companies are using skills to “teach agents about their organizational best practices,” Murag said.<\/p>\n

The rise of AI agents<\/p>\n

Tech leaders have described AI agents as a potential game-changer for office work. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman<\/a> said in June that AI agents are already performing tasks that are normally done by junior-level employees.<\/p>\n

“You hear people that talk about their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, look at the quality, figure out how it fits together, give feedback, and it sounds a lot like how they work with a team of still relatively junior employees,” Altman said of AI agents at the Snowflake Summit 2025.<\/p>\n

We’ll “start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge, or can figure out solutions to business problems that are kind of very non-trivial,” Altman added.<\/p>\n

Microsoft’s AI platform product lead<\/a> Asha Sharma said in an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” in August that AI agents<\/a> could flatten corporate hierarchies.<\/p>\n

“The whole kind of organizational construct might start to look different in a few years,” he said. “You just don’t need as many layers.”<\/p>\n

But some people in the industry have said agents have been overhyped.<\/p>\n

Guido Appenzeller<\/a>, a partner at a16z, said on a company podcast episode in May that some startups are simply adding a chat interface to a language model and calling it an agent so they can charge more.<\/p>\n

“A couple of startups are basically saying, ‘Hey, we can price this software that we’re building much, much higher because this is an agent,'” he said, adding that “there’s a marketing angle to agents.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The tech industry has spent the past year racing to build AI agents, but Anthropic researchers say a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[170619,182,60823,170623,181,507,170621,3426,7263,6292,170622,170620,170625,3590,170626,170627,54848,74,170624],"class_list":["post-339227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-agent-skill","tag-ai","tag-altman","tag-anthropic-researcher","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-barry-zhang","tag-company","tag-industry","tag-job","tag-mahesh-murag","tag-more-ai-agent","tag-office-work","tag-people","tag-real-breakthrough","tag-reusable-workflow","tag-task","tag-technology","tag-use-case"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}