Exclusive: Anthropic warns fully AI employees are a year away

The big picture: Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation hotbed, Jason Clinton, the company's chief information security officer, told Axios.

• Agents typically focus on a specific, programmable task. In security, that's meant having autonomous agents respond to phishing alerts and other threat indicators.
• Virtual employees would take that automation a step further: These AI identities would have their own "memories," their own roles in the company and even their own corporate accounts and passwords.
• They would have a level of autonomy that far exceeds what agents have today.
• "In that world, there are so many problems that we haven't solved yet from a security perspective that we need to solve," Clinton said.