Big Tech sets out its pitches on AI agents

Richard Waters compares today’s agent race to the pre-iPhone mobile era of Windows Mobile and Symbian, when nobody knew what the winning form would be. Recent launches: Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s dots, a Microsoft Copilot revamp (with a new Autopilot mode and three tabs), Apple’s agentic Siri in its latest iOS, and a Google work assistant in Gemini, plus start-up Instinct. Meta pitches everyday tasks and aims to take a cut of transactions, but Jefferies says about two-thirds of travel, commerce and reservation sites block Muse in some way; Walmart has its own agent, Sparky, and has allied with Meta for Muse. Sam Altman framed dots as for a “high-agency engineer or chief of staff”, initially only on ChatGPT plans of $100 a month or more. Microsoft’s PC-recall privacy outcry of two years ago is cited as a trust warning, and Amazon is blocking agents from Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta “at least for now”. Caveats: the form agents will take is unclear, trust and habit change are hurdles, and whether a single agent or many specialist agents will win is unresolved.