The Agentic Web: AI Agents Will Redefine the Internet

The Internet as we know it could be on the cusp of dramatic change as autonomous AI agents become the primary users of the web, say researchers. In a recent position paper, a multi-institution team laid out their vision for how online infrastructure will have to adapt to the new reality of this “agentic web,” and discussed the promise and peril of this transition.

While most people are already familiar with AI chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), tech companies are racing to develop AI agents capable of autonomously navigating the web to carry out tasks on behalf of users. If this dream becomes a reality, the Internet will increasingly be driven by machine-to-machine interactions as these agents coordinate to achieve the goals of their owners.

This situation would require a fundamental redesign of the Internet’s underlying architecture and would transform both everyday online experiences and the dynamics of the digital economy. And while users could benefit in terms of convenience and efficiency, the changeover also holds the potential for major security risks.

IEEE Spectrum spoke to one of the authors of the recent paper, Dawn Song, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and renowned expert on AI safety and security. Song talked about what a future agentic web could look like and the implications of such a shift.

The Coming of the Agentic Web

What is the agentic web and how will it be different from today’s web?

Dawn Song: If you look at the web today, it’s very much designed for humans. The whole UI [user interface] is about how humans consume information, make decisions, and take actions on the web. But agents don’t operate like humans, and they don’t have the same kind of limitations as humans, so the web can be designed very differently.

In a traditional setting, if a user wants to buy a piece of clothing they will go to a website, type in what they want to buy, and then the website is going to show different choices. This design is limited by human constraints: A human has to be able to see the different pieces of clothing, and they can only see so much at the time, and then they need to scroll down the web page.

But in the agentic web, a user can have an agent that knows their intent and preferences and the websites can have agents too. Then essentially the user’s agent can talk to the website’s agent, and they don’t have the same kind of limitations as users. The user can only see so much at the time, but the agent can consume so much more information. Today’s large language models can summarize thousands of articles in a matter of seconds in parallel.

Also with this agent-to-agent interaction, as the agent gets more information it can quickly decide what additional information it needs to get. Then it can send more requests and negotiate with the other agents. So the entire interaction will be completely different, and hence the interfaces will be completely different as…