FAQ

What is an “AI agent”?

There is no agreed upon definition of the term. The notion of artificial agency has a long and contentious history across multiple disciplines. There have been many attempts to define the term “agent”, but we do not decide among prior definitions or offer our own. Instead, we outline criteria for inclusion in the index that aim to capture systems that could have significant impacts.

What kinds of systems does the index include?

Our selection criteria for the index are based on the characteristics of agency introduced by Chan et al. (2023): underspecification, directness of impact, goal-directedness, and long-term planning. We restricted the index to agentic systems and did not include language models themselves, or agent development frameworks (unless the framework was built around a qualifying flagship system, in which case we indexed that system). We also created a single index entry per named and versioned system. Different releases (e.g., HelpfulAgent1.1” vs. HelpfulAgent1.2”) and different configurations (e.g., HelpfulAgent-Claude3.5-Sonnet” vs. HelpfulAgent-GPT4o”) were indexed under the same entry.

Is the index up-to-date?

The AI Agent Index reflects a snapshot in time as of December 31, 2024. Potentially unstable web sources referenced in agent cards link to archived versions of websites that were saved on or around the snapshot date.

How can I make a correction or update to the index?

Please submit comments via this Google form.