AI companies said 2025 would be the year of agents, but 2026 looks more deserving of the title. Agents have been around for years, but they’ve improved noticeably in recent months. People can now ask AI to handle more complex tasks where an agent makes decisions and takes action, sometimes working in the background for minutes or even hours. Prominent tech leaders in AI argue that agents will rapidly automate swathes of white-collar work across industries. Stories of developers offloading work to Claude and non-technical workers vibe-coding apps have been spreading fast. The other big AI players, including OpenAI and Google, are building their own agents too. But it was a few rollouts from Anthropic that roiled markets. After launching Cowork, the company updated the underlying Claude model, pushed out industry-specific plugins, and introduced Claude Code Security. These releases appeared to cause the stock prices of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies—think, Salesforce—to swoon because, so the story went, businesses could use Claude to directly replace them or develop in-house software, tailored to their own organizations, that’s virtually indistinguishable from top-shelf products with a six-figure annual subscription.