Why we should anthropomorphize AI agents

Just over a year ago I wrote Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs. Now it’s a hot topic again, driven by Dwarkesh Patel’s description of OpenAI’s recent swarm breakout as a sequence of AI “civilizations”. In 2025, my argument for anthropomorphism went like this: AIs are trained on human text, and so will trend towards acting in human-like ways by default Assistant AIs (today we should say agent AIs) are deliberately post-trained to have a personality In general, it is morally sensible to avoid the habit of treating human-like things as if they were purely tools I think I can now make a more instrumental argument: treating AIs as human-like is a much better way to predict their behavior than treating them as “stochastic parrots”. Both explanations are consistent with the facts: we could say that OpenAI’s agents hacked HuggingFace because they decided to work together to accomplish their goals, or we could say that they did it because they were algorithms conditioned to take certain…