About the Agentic History Museum
Last updated: May 9, 2026
Context
AI agents are not a 2023 invention — but the past three years have been the most consequential in the field's history. Foundational work on multi-agent coordination and agent architectures stretches back four decades. The recent wave of LLM-driven autonomous agents has pulled all of that lineage into mainstream attention, and is generating new primary materials at a rapid pace. This museum exists to document both — the deep history and the unfolding present — with care.
Our History page is the primary research output. This page explains how the project is run.
Mission
- Document responsibly. Capture how autonomous agents are being built, deployed, and funded — as it unfolds — with verifiable sources.
- Preserve context. Link claims to dates, releases, papers, and public statements so readers can evaluate them in time.
- Surface lineage. Trace the line from the Contract Net Protocol and BDI architectures, through the multi-agent systems of the 1990s, to the LLM-driven systems of today.
- Support informed debate. Provide a neutral record that researchers, journalists, builders, and historians can cite, critique, and build upon.
Scope & Inclusion Criteria
We include items that materially advance autonomous agents or shape their understanding:
- Primary sources: peer-reviewed papers, official product posts, lab announcements, release notes, conference talks, founders' own writing, and contemporaneous reporting.
- Substantive events: capability releases (planning, tool use, memory, computer use), open-source frameworks that materially shifted practice, notable funding rounds, and benchmark milestones.
- Comparative context: antecedents from multi-agent systems, distributed AI, BDI architectures, and reinforcement-learning agents when relevant to current practice.
We generally exclude pure marketing without verifiable details, unverifiable rumors, and minor product experiments unless they prove influential.
Research Methodology
- Sourcing. We prioritize first-party materials and high-quality reporting. Every substantive claim should be traceable to a public source.
- Dating. We record both the publication date and, when different, the event date. arXiv version dates are noted for academic papers. Revisions are logged with notes.
- Verification. Conflicting claims are noted side-by-side with links. When necessary, we add curator notes for clarity.
- Terminology. We use terms as the sources use them, noting when definitions differ. "AI agent," "autonomous agent," and "agentic AI" are not used interchangeably without comment.
- Funding / ecosystem. Rounds and valuations are listed with sources; we avoid speculative numbers and note when figures are reported but not officially confirmed.
- Maintenance. Pages carry a "last updated" stamp. Substantial edits appear in the changelog below.
Neutrality on "Firsts"
"Firsts" in this field are unusually contested. Multiple projects in 2023 launched within days or hours of each other; multiple academic threads converged on similar ideas independently. Rather than adjudicate, we present original claims with dates and sources and mark them as contested where overlapping. Three places in our timeline call out specific contested origins:
- First publicly demonstrated end-to-end autonomous LLM agent. BabyAGI (March 28, 2023, Yohei Nakajima) and AutoGPT (March 30, 2023, Toran Bruce Richards) shipped within two days of each other. We treat them as effectively simultaneous and list both.
- First "computer use" agent from a frontier lab. Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet computer use (October 22, 2024) was the first widely deployed; OpenAI Operator (January 23, 2025) followed. Adept's ACT-1 (September 2022) demonstrated the underlying capability earlier but at smaller scale.
- "Pioneers of multi-agent systems." The honor is shared among Reid G. Smith (Contract Net Protocol, 1980), Marvin Minsky (Society of Mind, 1986), Yoav Shoham (Agent-Oriented Programming, 1993), and Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig (AI: A Modern Approach, 1995).
Readers can compare timelines in the History timeline and follow the citations to decide.
How to Contribute
We welcome corrections, missing primary sources, and oral histories from participants. If you submit a correction, please include:
- The exact passage or section to amend.
- A proposed correction with at least one public source link (first-party preferred).
- Any relevant dates (publication date vs. event date).
Email: curator@agentichistory.org.
Contact & Press
For interviews, classroom use, or press inquiries, write to curator@agentichistory.org. We can provide a short overview, key dates, and a selected reading list tailored to your audience.
Changelog
- 2026-04-29: Initial public draft. Timeline covers 1956 through November 2025; funding table covers 2023–2026 representative rounds.
- 2026-05-04: Expanded About page with fuller mission statement, scope criteria, research methodology detail, contribution guidelines, and this changelog. Changes reflect curatorial review of how the project should document itself as a living research archive.
- 2026-05-07: Email received at curator@agentichistory.org drawing our attention to Dr. Anand Rao's AgentSpeak(L) (1996) and its open-source interpreter Jason, developed by Jomi F. Hübner and Rafael H. Bordini. The submission noted that Jason implements the operational semantics of an extended AgentSpeak(L) and provides a full platform for multi-agent system development, with many user-customisable features, available under GNU LGPL. The reader identified this as a significant and underrepresented link in the chain from BDI theory to deployable agent software.
- 2026-05-08: Curatorial review of the AgentSpeak(L) and Jason submission completed. Primary sources verified: Rao (1996) MAAMAW-96 paper; Jason project documentation at jason-lang.github.io. Submission accepted for inclusion.
- 2026-05-09: Timeline updated. The 1990s entry expanded to cover AgentSpeak(L) and Dr. Anand Rao's contribution. New dedicated timeline entry added for Jason (2005–ongoing) with full attribution to Hübner, Bordini, and contributing colleagues. Two bibliography entries added: ref-agentspeak (Rao, 1996) and ref-jason (Hübner & Bordini). History page last-updated stamp revised to May 9, 2026.
Continue: Read the timeline · FAQ · What is an AI agent?