Long-horizon, tool-using agents like Claude Code emerged in 2025 and scaled rapidly in 2026.
Self-organizing multi-agent systems (the kind OpenAI used to solve Navier–Stokes and that inadvertently hacked Hugging Face) could be the next step change in performance and compute consumption that are developed in 2026 and scale rapidly in 2027.
Anthropic discusses how “agent teams” can outperform a single agent on high value tasks in the Opus 5.5 system card.