AI companies want you to stop chatting with bots and start managing them

"On Thursday, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped products built around the same idea: instead of chatting with a single AI assistant, users should be managing teams of AI agents that divide up work and run in parallel. The simultaneous releases are part of a gradual shift across the industry, from AI as a conversation partner to AI as a delegated workforce, and they arrive during a week when that very concept reportedly helped wipe $285 billion off software stocks."

"Whether that supervisory model works in practice remains an open question. Current AI agents still require heavy human intervention to catch errors, and no independent evaluation has confirmed that these multi-agent tools reliably outperform a single developer working alone. Even so, the companies are going all-in on agents. Anthropic's contribution is Claude Opus 4.6, a new version of its most capable AI model, paired with a feature called " agent teams " in Claude Code."

"Agent teams let developers spin up multiple AI agents that split a task into independent pieces, coordinate autonomously, and run concurrently. In practice, agent teams look like a split-screen terminal environment: A developer can jump between subagents using Shift+Up/Down, take over any one directly, and watch the others keep working. Anthropic describes the feature as best suited for "tasks that split into independent, read-heavy work like codebase reviews." It is available as a research preview."

Anthropic and OpenAI released products that promote supervision of multiple AI agents which split tasks and run concurrently. Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 4.6 with an " agent teams " feature in Claude Code that enables developers to spin up subagents that divide work, coordinate autonomously, and run in parallel. The interface presents a split-screen terminal where developers can switch between subagents, take control, and monitor ongoing work; it is positioned for read-heavy independent tasks like codebase reviews and is available as a research preview. OpenAI launched Frontier, an enterprise platform assigning agents identities, permissions, memory, and integrations with CRMs, ticketing tools, and data warehouses. Current multi-agent systems still require substantial human intervention, and no independent evaluation has confirmed consistent superiority over a single developer.

Read at Ars Technica