Agents Articles
22 articles across AI Catchup's news, guides, tutorials, and comparisons.
All Agents articles
Claude Marketplace Adds Cursor, CrowdStrike, Factory, Gamma, and Vercel
Anthropic is expanding Claude Marketplace with Cursor, CrowdStrike, Factory, Gamma, and Vercel. Enterprise customers can use an existing Anthropic spend commitment to buy Claude-powered solutions from marketplace partners, with Anthropic directing buyers to their account team rather than a self-serve checkout.
Claude Computer Use Runs in the Background in Cowork and Claude Code
Anthropic added computer use to Claude Cowork and Claude Code in the Claude Desktop app. Claude can click, type, open apps, and use dev tools while you keep working on macOS, with Windows support also documented. The beta is limited to Pro and Max plans and still requires the desktop app to be open and the computer awake.
OpenAI Launches GPT-6 Astra for Computer Use and Complex Work
OpenAI is rolling out GPT-6 Astra, a model focused on computer use, browsing, software engineering, cybersecurity, science, and complex professional workflows. Access starts with a limited set of organizations before expanding to ChatGPT plans and developer platforms.
Claude Cowork Gets a Built-In Browser: Web Tasks Without an Extension
Anthropic added a built-in browser to Claude Cowork on the desktop app. Claude can open webpages in a separate side-panel browser, read pages, click, type, and fill forms without using the user's own tabs or browser extension. The rollout covers Pro, Max, and Team plans, with Enterprise admin controls available first.
Claude Managed Agents Add Memory Stores, Domain Controls, and a Redesigned Console
Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents updates let self-hosted sandbox sessions attach memory stores, restrict web_search and web_fetch with allowed_domains or blocked_domains, and inspect multi-agent sessions in a redesigned Claude Console viewer.
Claude Can Now Send Gmail Emails and Manage Google Drive Files
Anthropic's Claude can now send and reply to Gmail messages and manage Google Drive files from the connectors menu. The official announcement says the update is available on paid plans, while Anthropic's current help documentation details approval prompts, supported actions, admin controls, and important data-access limits.
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Builder's Guide Shows How to Make Agents More Efficient
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 builder's guide lays out a Responses API architecture for longer-running agents: persist reasoning, compact context, delegate work across agents, and move deterministic tool processing into code. OpenAI reports that these patterns raised GPT-5.6 Sol's ARC-AGI-3 score from 13.3% to 38.3% while using roughly 6x fewer output tokens.
Claude Code Sessions Can Now Message Each Other
Claude Code lets independent sessions discover and message one another, with controls for holding, refusing, or approving incoming messages. As of August 2026, sessions can also start conversations with sessions on other machines or Claude Code on the web, and native Windows is supported; the August 7 launch allowed only replies across machines and covered macOS and Linux. Messaging is on with nothing to enable; a held message in a headless session now expires after five minutes by default.
Cursor Router: Auto Balance, Auto Intelligence, and Cost Modes
Cursor Router is the routing system behind Auto, and Cursor documents it as available only on Teams and Enterprise plans. Open the model picker, select Auto, and pick Cost, Balance, or Intelligence under Optimize For. Every mode bills at the list price of whichever model the request is routed to.
Cursor SDK Bridge Opens Agent Control to Rust, Go, and More
Cursor has open-sourced an SDK Bridge that exposes a stable sdk.v1 protocol for driving Cursor agents from Rust, Go, Java, and other languages. Adapters run a small local bridge and communicate over Connect RPCs, while the bridge handles the connection to Cursor's API.
Cursor Agents Can Now Act Across Google Workspace
Cursor says new Google Workspace plugins give its coding agents direct access to Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. The plugins can search, read, draft, send, create, and manage Workspace data from inside Cursor, and install from the Cursor Marketplace or the Customize page.
Cursor Launches Cursor Start: ₹649/Month Plan for Developers in India
Cursor Start is an India-only plan at ₹649 per month, tax inclusive, billed monthly in INR. Cursor's help docs say it covers Grok 4.6, Grok 4.5, and Composer 2.5 in non-fast mode at a fixed medium effort level, excludes third-party models and on-demand spend, and pauses AI features when the monthly pool runs out.
Cursor Adds Side Chats: Durable Agent Threads You Can @-Mention Back Into the Main Conversation
Cursor introduced Side chats: separate, durable agent conversations that run alongside a main chat and can be @-mentioned to pull context back.
OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Work: A Codex-Sibling Agent for Long-Running Deliverables
OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Work, a new agent in ChatGPT powered by Codex and GPT-5.6 that takes action across apps and files and stays on a project for hours to turn a goal into finished work. Work handles research and deliverables; Codex stays the dedicated software-development agent.
OpenAI adds GPT-Realtime-2.1-mini to the API with reasoning and tool use
GPT-Realtime-2.1-mini is a distilled reasoning model for realtime voice, with function calling, a 128,000-token context window, and text, audio, and image input. OpenAI's pricing page lists it at the same rates as GPT-Realtime-mini: $0.60/$2.40 per 1M text tokens and $10/$20 per 1M audio tokens.
OpenAI introduces GeneBench-Pro, a research-level benchmark for agentic computational biology
On June 30, 2026, OpenAI announced GeneBench-Pro: a research-level benchmark meant to measure how well AI agents navigate messy biological data and make the judgment calls real computational biology depends on. OpenAI says GeneBench-Pro contains 129 questions and is open-sourcing 10 representative case studies as a public package on Hugging Face under the MIT License.
You Can Now Delegate Tasks to Cursor From Inside Notion
Notion used the Cursor SDK to embed coding agents directly in its workspace. You can now tag Cursor in a doc, mention it in a thread, or assign it a database issue, and Cursor plans, builds, tests, verifies its own work, and opens a PR. Notion says it built the integration in a few weeks on the Cursor SDK.
Claude Platform's 'ant' CLI Brings the Full Claude API to Your Terminal
Anthropic's 'ant' CLI exposes every Claude API resource as a terminal subcommand. As of September 2026 you install it through Homebrew, curl, or Go, authenticate by browser login, API key, or Workload Identity Federation, manage agents as code with 'ant apply' (CLI 1.30.0 or later), and run a self-hosted Managed Agents worker with 'ant beta:worker poll' or 'ant beta:worker run'.
Cursor 3.5 brings Automations into the Agents Window (plus multi-repo and no-repo automations)
Cursor 3.5 moves Automations into the Agents Window, adds multi-repo and no-repo automations, and introduces five new no-repo templates (with a 7-day 50% promo on agent runs for new automations).
Claude Code adds dynamic workflows (research preview) for large parallel agent runs
Dynamic workflows in Claude Code let Claude write orchestration scripts, fan out work across tens to hundreds of parallel subagents, verify results, and resume long-running jobs.
Claude Managed Agents Add Self-Hosted Sandboxes (Public Beta) and MCP Tunnels (Research Preview)
Anthropic says Claude Managed Agents can now run tool execution in a sandbox you control (public beta) and connect to private MCP servers via MCP tunnels (research preview). The update targets enterprise security requirements by keeping execution and private services within an organization's perimeter.
Cursor SDK Lands in Public Beta: Programmatic Agents in TypeScript with Local and Cloud Runtimes
Cursor launched the Cursor SDK in public beta on April 29, 2026, exposing the same agent runtime that powers Cursor desktop, CLI, and web behind a TypeScript package. `@cursor/sdk` lets you spawn agents against local files, Cursor-hosted VMs, or self-hosted workers, stream results, and bill on standard token-based pricing -- moving Cursor from an editor surface to a programmable platform.