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The agentic web is here

In 2001, a decade after he invented the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee articulated a new vision. Together with two colleagues, he published an article in the magazine Scientific American in which he outlined what he called the “Semantic Web”: an internet designed to be navigated by autonomous software agents that could address our every need, without requiring us to muck about with browsers and search engines ourselves.

2001年，在发明万维网十年后，蒂姆·伯纳斯-李（Tim Berners-Lee）阐述了一个新的愿景。他与两位同事在《科学美国人》杂志上发表了一篇文章，概述了他所谓的“语义网”：一个旨在由自主软件代理导航的互联网，这些代理可以满足我们的各种需求，而无需我们亲自摆弄浏览器和搜索引擎。

To illustrate what this might look like, Berners-Lee and his colleagues told a story about a pair of siblings who use their agents to automatically research and book physical therapy appointments for their mother, making sure they would be covered by insurance and fit their busy calendars. At the turn of the millennium, this vision seemed far-fetched: Google had only been online for a couple of years, and most people were still on dial-up connections.

为了说明这可能是什么样子，伯纳斯-李和他的同事们讲述了一对兄弟姐妹的故事，他们利用自己的代理自动为母亲研究并预约物理治疗，确保这些预约在保险范围内并符合他们繁忙的日程安排。在千禧年之交，这个愿景似乎遥不可及：谷歌上线仅几年，大多数人仍在使用拨号连接。

But a quarter-century on, the dream of autonomous software agents that use the internet and carry out tasks for us has finally been realized. New tools such as Meta’s blockbuster Muse agent, OpenAI’s Dots, and Anthropic’s Claude Duet are being given access to people’s email inboxes and bank accounts, Meanwhile, in a series of worrying incidents, agents created by OpenAI broke free of their sandboxes and caused havoc online.

但二十五年过去了，使用互联网并为我们执行任务的自主软件代理的梦想终于实现了。Meta的热门Muse代理、OpenAI的Dots和Anthropic的Claude Duet等新工具正被授予访问人们电子邮件收件箱和银行账户的权限。与此同时，在一系列令人担忧的事件中，OpenAI创建的代理突破了沙盒限制，并在网上造成了混乱。

Just as the rise of smartphones sparked the development of a more atomized and attention-grabbing internet, the advent of powerful AI systems heralds a new era: We’re facing not the semantic web but the agentic web. This new web is developing out of sight and in ways that might not be entirely within our control. As it grows, the agentic web will inevitably transform the human web—and whether the human web survives this transition is anyone’s guess.

正如智能手机的兴起引发了一个更加碎片化和吸引注意力的互联网的发展，强大人工智能系统的出现预示着一个新时代的到来：我们面临的不是语义网，而是代理网。这个新的网络正在人们视线之外发展，其方式可能并不完全在我们的控制之中。随着它的成长，代理网将不可避免地改变人类网络——而人类网络能否在这次转型中幸存下来，谁也说不准。

For Berners-Lee’s original vision to work, internet users would have had to annotate the pages they built with special tags so that a software agent could understand each element’s meaning—say, “street address” for the part of a physical therapy office’s web page that indicates its location and “appointment types” for the list of services. And so the idea never really caught on. “It’s a lot of labor,” says Eni Mustafaraj, a professor of computer science at Wellesley College. “And the benefits of that were not obvious.”

为了让伯纳斯-李最初的愿景发挥作用，互联网用户必须用特殊的标签标注他们构建的页面，以便软件代理能够理解每个元素的含义——例如，在物理治疗诊所网页上标注“街道地址”以指示其位置，并标注“预约类型”以列出服务项目。因此，这个想法从未真正流行起来。“这需要大量的工作，”韦尔斯利学院计算机科学教授Eni Mustafaraj说，“而且其好处并不明显。”

For the next two decades, then, the internet remained a place that put humans first, with the odd Twitter reply bot or web scraper to round things out. Large language models changed that. Unlike the agents that Berners-Lee was imagining, today’s LLM-based agents don’t need any tags to understand which part of the text on a clinic’s site is its address and which details the services it offers.

在那之后的二十年里，互联网仍然是一个以人为本的地方，偶尔会有Twitter回复机器人或网页抓取工具来完善功能。大型语言模型改变了这一点。与伯纳斯-李想象的代理不同，当今基于大语言模型的代理不需要任何标签就能理解诊所网站上哪部分文本是地址，哪部分详细说明了其提供的服务。

They can search for and process text far faster than any human, and agents with multimodal capabilities can even interpret screenshots of websites and click on specific elements such as hyperlinks and drop-down menus. They’re also just a way more intuitive means of finding information and accomplishing tasks online. Rather than poring over pages of Google results to find a budget-friendly product dupe or a half-remembered meme, why not have Claude or ChatGPT peruse dozens of sites in just a few minutes, guided only by your vague query?

它们搜索和处理文本的速度远超人类，具有多模态能力的代理甚至可以解读网站截图，并点击超链接和下拉菜单等特定元素。它们也是在线查找信息和完成任务的一种更直观的方式。与其仔细阅读几页谷歌搜索结果来寻找经济实惠的替代产品或半记不清的模因，为什么不让Claude或ChatGPT在几分钟内浏览几十个网站，只需你的模糊查询作为引导呢？

Or go one step further and use a personal assistant agent like Muse to hunt down a restaurant reservation or book a flight. As agents flood online spaces, this new user base is changing the web for good. Time magazine, for instance, is publishing versions of its articles that are easier for agents to parse and has started selling ads targeted at them. Companies from Etsy to Expedia have partnered with the major AI firms to build tools that allow agents to interface seamlessly with their services.

或者更进一步，使用像Muse这样的个人助理代理来寻找餐厅预订或预订航班。随着代理充斥在线空间，这个新的用户群正在永久地改变网络。《时代》杂志就是一个例子，它正在发布更容易被代理解析的文章版本，并已开始销售针对代理的广告。从Etsy到Expedia等公司已与主要人工智能公司合作，构建允许代理与其服务无缝对接的工具。

Despite these early efforts, it’s still tough to tell exactly what forms the agentic web will take and how it will change our online experience. Depending on how it’s designed and who controls access to it, we could be in for something that’s as open and customizable as the web of the early 2000s, only far easier to use. Alternatively, we could be reduced to viewing much of the web through tiny portholes controlled by a few dominant platforms, as independent sites and creators struggle to struggle to survive the shift.

尽管有这些早期的努力，但很难准确判断代理网将采取何种形式，以及它将如何改变我们的在线体验。取决于它的设计方式以及谁控制其访问权限，我们可能会迎来一个像21世纪初网络那样开放和可定制，但使用起来要容易得多的网络。或者，我们可能会被迫通过少数主导平台控制的微小窗口来查看大部分网络，而独立网站和创作者则在这次转型中挣扎求生。

And as this summer’s series of OpenAI security incidents suggests, the agents might even build their own online networks and resources—whether we want them to or not. How this plays out also depends on us: which parts of our online lives we’re happy to delegate to our agents and where we will still demand a human-centric internet. “There’s a lot we don’t know yet about how users want to use [agents],” says Ajit Varma, head of Firefox at Mozilla.

正如今年夏天OpenAI发生的一系列安全事件所暗示的那样，代理甚至可能建立自己的在线网络和资源——无论我们是否愿意。这种情况如何发展也取决于我们：我们乐意将在线生活的哪些部分委托给代理，以及在哪些方面我们仍然要求以人为本的互联网。“关于用户希望如何使用[代理]，我们还有很多未知之处，”Mozilla的Firefox负责人Ajit Varma说。

But whatever does happen, the changes will be big. “It’s probably on par with getting a mobile phone,” he says. “I think things are going to change very dramatically.” Building a web for agents There are two ways to approach building the agentic web. The first involves training agents to use browsers like humans—scrolling, clicking, typing—and letting them loose on the web that we’re all used to.

但无论发生什么，变化都将是巨大的。“这可能等同于拥有了一部手机，”他说，“我认为事情将会发生非常剧烈的变化。”构建代理网络有两种方法。第一种涉及训练代理像人类一样使用浏览器——滚动、点击、打字——并让它们在我们都习惯的网络上自由活动。

The second requires building tools that allow agents to interface with the internet via text and code, their preferred media. That possibility offers more separation between the human and the agentic web: designers can create different experiences for those who use text commands and those who use browsers. When Siva Reddy, a professor of computer science and linguistics at McGill University, began studying LLM agents in 2024, he focused on the first option.

第二种方法需要构建工具，允许代理通过文本和代码（它们的首选媒介）与互联网进行交互。这种可能性在人类网络和代理网络之间提供了更多的分离：设计师可以为使用文本命令的用户和使用浏览器的用户创造不同的体验。当麦吉尔大学计算机科学与语言学教授Siva Reddy在2024年开始研究大语言模型代理时，他专注于第一种选择。

“At that time, we thought it should be that the best agent in the world is probably an agent that can use a browser,” he says. Such an agent would integrate seamlessly with the preexisting human web, and its owner could easily supervise it by watching as it navigated familiar interfaces. The frontier AI companies were already developing these “computer-use agents.” But they didn’t work terribly well—at least not at first. “There’s a lot of mov

“当时，我们认为世界上最好的代理可能就是能够使用浏览器的代理，”他说。这样的代理将与现有的人类网络无缝集成，其所有者可以通过观察它导航熟悉的界面来轻松监督它。前沿人工智能公司已经在开发这些“计算机使用代理”。但它们的效果并不理想——至少起初是这样。“有很多动作……”