OpenClaw—a personal AI assistant that you could talk to from your phone—got everyone’s attention. Beneath the buzz, OpenClaw had a limited set of tricks—and a saboteur’s approach to security. But it felt like the future. And so companies from Nvidia to Tencent have been quick to build their own safer, more reliable bots on top of OpenClaw’s open-source code.

But the real power of agents comes when they can work as a team rather than as lone-wolf bots carrying out single tasks, such as using a browser to make a restaurant reservation or sending you a summary of your inbox. New tools can yoke together multiple agents, give each of them a different job, and orchestrate their behaviors so that they all pull together to complete tasks more complex than an individual agent could do by itself.

For example, Claude Code, released by Anthropic last year, lets you launch and coordinate several coding agents at once (some users have reported having as many as a couple of dozen subagents on the go), with different agents working on different parts of the code base at the same time. Agents can also be given specific roles: One writes code, another tests it, a third fixes bugs, and so on. Such tools promise to turn coders into project managers, letting them delegate and oversee many more tasks than they could cope with by themselves.

But coding was just the start. The latest multi-agent tools are aimed at people who don’t need or don’t want to develop software. Desktop apps such as Anthropic’s Claude Cowork (which the firm claims to have built using Claude Code in just 10 days, instead of the several months such a project might otherwise have taken), OpenAI’s Codex, and Perplexity’s Computer are all pitched as general-purpose productivity tools for white-collar professionals. They let you hand off bespoke workflows to teams of agents that coordinate across a wide range of computer-based office tasks, from managing inboxes and inventory to handling customer complaints.