“How many AI agents are running unattended right now?” by Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

There are 8 billion human minds running in the world right now. Recently a new digital species has emerged. How many digital minds are there alive in the world right now?

Define a digital mind to be an AI agent that runs continuously without human intervention for more than 24 hours. How many of these digital minds are there currently running? We provide several different Fermi estimates based on publicly available information.

• Based on global token usage we estimate 300k–1M agent loops run at any moment, of which perhaps 5000-25,000 are in a 24h+ unattended stretch.
• Anthropic reports about 30,000 agents running concurrently in its latest report. We guess roughly 2,000–4,500 of those 30,000 agents are more than 24 hours past their last human input.
• OpenAI's research org reports 3.1 agent-workdays per human workday and a average of $600 a day in inference per researcher (90th percentile: over 7,000 dollars). We back out roughly 2,000–10,000 concurrent agents, and perhaps 150–2,500 in a 24h+ unattended stretch.

Total concurrent agents globally estimate based on token count

Google reported over 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month at I/O in May, with its APIs at roughly 19 [...]

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Outline:

(01:29) Total concurrent agents globally estimate based on token count

(03:35) Anthropic's pace-of-AI-development report

(06:00) OpenAI

(08:34) Conclusion

(09:04) Sources

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 1st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aG4x74utw8pEJ5MZB/how-many-ai-agents-are-running-unattended-right-now-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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