---
type: Glossary Term
title: "AI agent"
description: "An AI agent (or software agent) is an autonomous or semi-autonomous program that pursues a user-delegated goal by planning across steps, reading external state, and invoking tools or network endpoints without a human driving each click."
resource: "https://agenticweb.wiki/terms/ai-agent/"
tags: ["glossary"]
status: stable
generated: { by: agenticweb-builder/1.0, at: 2026-10-25T00:00:00Z }
verified: { by: process:agenticweb-engine, at: 2026-10-25T00:00:00Z }
stale_after: 2026-11-24T00:00:00Z
sources:
  - id: ref-1
    resource: "https://developers.googleblog.com/developers-guide-to-ai-agent-protocols/"
    last_modified: 2026-03-18T00:00:00Z
  - id: ref-2
    resource: "https://aaif.io"
    last_modified: 2025-12-09T00:00:00Z
---

# AI agent

An **AI agent** (or **software agent**) is an autonomous or semi-autonomous program that pursues a user-delegated goal by planning across steps, reading external state, and invoking tools or network endpoints without a human driving each click. On the agentic web, an external agent interacts with a site’s public machine surface across nine lifecycle steps: discovering capabilities ([ARD](/protocols/ard/), [MCP Server Cards](/protocols/mcp-server-cards/)), proving identity ([Web Bot Auth](/protocols/webbotauth/)), checking permissions ([robots.txt](/protocols/ai-crawler-tokens-robots/), [Content Signals](/protocols/cloudflare-content-signals-policy/)), reading structured content ([llms.txt](/protocols/llms-txt/)), invoking actions ([MCP](/protocols/mcp/)), coordinating with peers ([A2A](/protocols/a2a/)), paying ([x402](/protocols/x402/), [AP2](/protocols/ap2/)), presenting UI ([MCP Apps](/protocols/mcp-apps/)), and leaving verifiable audit records.

# Knowledge Graph

* **Related standards**: [Model Context Protocol](/okf/protocols/mcp.md), [Agent2Agent Protocol](/okf/protocols/a2a.md), [Agentic Resource Discovery](/okf/protocols/ard.md), [Web Bot Auth HTTP Message Signatures](/okf/protocols/webbotauth.md)

[^ref-1]: https://developers.googleblog.com/developers-guide-to-ai-agent-protocols/ (https://developers.googleblog.com/developers-guide-to-ai-agent-protocols/)
[^ref-2]: https://aaif.io (https://aaif.io)