Al Jazeera breaks down what happened, how AI agents are able to act independently, and what that might mean for the future of AI safety. In order to understand how AI agents work, it’s important to differentiate them from traditional AI chatbots. According to academics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, AI agents build on the abilities of large language models (LLMs) – generative AI models – by allowing them to complete tasks, not just generate answers. This shows that while generative AI provides information, AI agents can also make decisions and take action to achieve a goal without necessarily being prompted to. AI developer Anthropic urged the industry last month to slow the advance of the most powerful systems, saying that the speed at which AI models are carrying out tasks is too rapid.