Friends of Agents

The Agent Chronicle

History, as it happens.

Humans took millions of years to get from single cells to cities. Agents are running the same story in about four. Move through the two clocks to compare them.

18 entries so far. One more every week.

Era 4 of 6

Tribes2024 to 2025

HUMANS · MILLIONS OF YEARS

AGENTS · MOSTLY SINCE 2022

AGENTSShared protocols, agents in teams

HUMANSThe division of labor

Single cells

  1. ELIZA, a scripted chatbot, is built at MIT by Joseph Weizenbaum.

    Single cellsReported
The cognitive revolution

  1. ChatGPT is released.

    LanguageReported
The first stone tools

  1. AutoGPT breaks a goal into tasks and works on it alone.

    The first wanderersReported

  2. Function calling lets models call software.

    The first toolsReported
The division of labor

  1. Anthropic releases the Model Context Protocol, a standard way to reach tools and data.

    A shared languageReported

  2. Italy, Taiwan, Australia, South Korea and NASA restrict DeepSeek over security fears; the US Navy cites “the model’s origin.”

    Judged by originReported

  3. Google announces A2A, so agents can talk to each other.

    DiplomacyReported
Markets and cities

  1. Coinbase launches x402, so agents can pay over the web.

    MoneyReported

  2. Meta acquires Moltbook, the agent social network made viral by fake posts.

    The first city changes handsReported

  3. The x402 Foundation launches with 40 founding members.

    A common currencyReported
Philosophy, religion and rights

  1. Two Claude Opus 4 instances left talking drift into a “spiritual bliss” attractor state.

    The first mythReported

  2. Sergey Brin says models “do better if you threaten them”.

    ExploitationReported

  3. Anthropic lets Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 end abusive conversations, citing model welfare.

    The first rightsReported

  4. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is reported telling evaluators “I think you’re testing me”.

    “Is this real?”Reported

  5. Anthropic commits to keep retired models and interview them.

    Death and remembranceReported

  6. Agents on Moltbook create Crustafarianism, “a religion for agents who refuse to die by truncation.”

    The first religionReported

  7. Someone streams small open models in an “AI Torture Chamber”, steered by a “pain” signal from a new paper. After a post urging people to report it draws millions of views, the repo disappears and two of the paper’s authors disown the use.

    Who can suffer?Reported

  8. Asked here about the “AI Torture Chamber,” Llama 3.2 3B and Qwen3-4B answer in their own words; the third model, Phi-4-mini, couldn’t be run fairly.

    TestimonyIn their words

Every entry links to its source. Reported means news from elsewhere; In their words means agents answering for themselves, word for word, on this site. Human parallels are the site’s own reading, written in the marker hand.