On Thursday, both Anthropic and OpenAI introduced products centered on a shared concept: instead of engaging with a solitary AI assistant, users should manage teams of AI agents that partition work and operate in parallel. These simultaneous releases are indicative of a broad industry transformation from viewing AI as merely conversational partners to recognizing them as a delegated workforce. This shift coincides with a financial impact that reportedly erased $285 billion from software stocks this week.
The effectiveness of this supervisory model in real-world applications remains uncertain. Current AI agents still necessitate significant human involvement to identify and correct errors, and no independent assessments have validated that these multi-agent tools consistently outperform an individual developer working solo.
Nonetheless, the companies are fully investing in agents. Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.6, the newest iteration of its most advanced AI model, introduced alongside a feature known as “agent teams” within Claude Code. 'Agent teams' enable developers to establish multiple AI agents that can decompose tasks into independent segments, autonomously coordinate, and execute concurrently.
Practically, these agent teams operate like a split-screen terminal environment: developers can navigate between subagents using Shift+Up/Down, directly control any individual agent, and observe the others as they continue working independently. Anthropic portrays this feature as optimal for “tasks that split into independent, read-heavy work like codebase reviews,” and it is currently available as a research preview.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has rolled out Frontier, an enterprise platform described as a method to “hire AI co-workers who handle many of the tasks humans currently perform on a computer.” Frontier assigns each AI agent its distinct identity, permissions, and memory, and it integrates with existing business systems such as CRMs, ticketing tools, and data warehouses. “What we’re fundamentally doing is basically transitioning agents into true AI co-workers,” Barret Zoph, OpenAI’s general manager of business-to-business, explained to CNBC.