Agentic History — Blog

Was AutoGPT Really the First AI Agent? A Source Reconstruction

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:00:00 -0400

AutoGPT was released on March 30, 2023. It is the project most non-specialists associate with the phrase “AI agent.” But “first” is one of the most contested claims in this field, and the record will not support a simple answer. Here is what the primary sources actually say.

What AutoGPT actually was

AutoGPT was an open-source Python project released by Toran Bruce Richards, founder of Significant Gravitas Ltd. It paired GPT-4 with a self-prompting loop, a web-browsing tool, file operations, and code execution. By April 3, 2023, it was the top-trending repository on GitHub. Within weeks, it crossed 100,000 stars — the fastest open-source project to reach that scale at the time.

Cognition Said to Be in Talks to Raise at $25 Billion Valuation

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Cognition, maker of the Devin autonomous AI software engineer, is in discussions for a new financing round at a reported valuation of approximately $25 billion, according to Bloomberg and SiliconANGLE reporting from April 2026. The figure would represent roughly a 2.5x increase from the $10.2 billion valuation set in its September 2025 raise of $400 million.

Devin’s annualized revenue grew from under $1 million in September 2024 to $73 million by June 2025. Cognition also acquired Windsurf, a coding assistant platform, in a deal reported ahead of the September round.

OpenAI's Agents SDK Signals the Industry Shift From Assistants to Autonomous Workers

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:00:00 -0400

When OpenAI released its Agents SDK and Responses API in March 2025, it did something its blog post understated: it officially ended the era of “AI assistants” and declared the era of autonomous agents open for business.

The SDK codifies the agent loop — plan, call tools, observe, repeat — into a first-party framework backed by the company behind the world’s most widely deployed AI model. Within weeks, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft had shipped comparable frameworks. By Q2 2025, “agent” had replaced “assistant” in the marketing language of every major frontier lab.