Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic: the four giants deliberately NOT calling their agents 'agents'
sujingshen · x · 2026-10-23
Part 2 of a series on how companies define personal agents, covering Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Anthropic — all capable (Siri AI reads your mail and acts across apps, Alexa+ books restaurants autonomously, Microsoft and Anthropic both ship agents that keep working after you close the laptop) yet restrained in naming, unlike Meta and OpenAI.
Key detail: on Sep 25 Microsoft launched an enterprise Copilot agent called Autopilot described as "always-on, proactive, personal" — but it lives in the company's Microsoft 365 tenant, uses a corporate directory identity, and does the company's work. Same word, different meanings.
- Apple: at WWDC (Jun 8) it only said "assistant"; Siri lead Mike Rockwell defined an agent as a system running in a loop — receive info, decide, act — and admitted Siri isn't there yet.
- The piece maps how each of the four defines the category and why "personal" is being redrawn.
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