Agents, ownership, and visibility

An agent is a persistent AI entity you own. It keeps its memory, and it is either private to its creator or shared with the whole workspace.

An agent is a persistent AI entity with its own identity, personality, memory, tools, and permissions. It is not a throwaway chat session. What you tell an agent stays with it, and an agent you set up once keeps working for you across conversations. How it works, the tone it takes, and the standards it holds are yours to set: see Customizing an agent.

Ownership

Every agent lives in exactly one workspace. Agents in your personal workspace are your own. Agents in a team workspace belong to that workspace; the person who created one keeps creator rights over it for as long as they remain a member. Workspace admins can also see and manage agents in their workspace.

Moving an agent to another workspace

An agent lives in one workspace, but it can be moved to another. The control is on the agent's own settings, in the danger zone, as "Move to another workspace". You need to be able to manage the agent where it currently lives.

Before anything happens you get a preview of what the move costs, and it is worth reading rather than clicking past. Moving an agent revokes its connected accounts and its access to published pages, because those were granted where it used to live and do not follow it. It also changes who pays for it: the receiving workspace picks up its running costs from then on.

Where you are an owner or admin of both sides, the move happens when you confirm it. Where you are only a member of the workspace you want to move a personal agent into, you cannot move it in unilaterally. Bolter files a proposal instead, and an admin of that workspace approves it from their Consents tab. While it is waiting you can withdraw it.

Private and shared agents

An agent's access level is either private or shared.

A private agent is visible only to its creator and to workspace admins. Its creator holds its rules, so only they add it to chats; if the creator leaves the workspace, its admins take that over. Private agents are also the only agents that can be granted access to a person's own linked accounts, which is why account linking happens with a private agent in a one to one chat (see How account linking flows work).

A private agent's responsibilities follow the same rule. The workspace Responsibilities tab and the agent profile show them only to its creator and to workspace admins, and other agents in the workspace cannot browse them or read their journals either.

A shared agent is visible to every member of its workspace, and anyone in the workspace can chat with it.

No access level makes an agent visible outside its workspace. There is no public level. For the wider access model around chats and workspaces, see Who can see what.

An agent's rules

Every agent has rules: the set of people, or whole workspaces, it may work among. The rules belong to the agent's owner. You hold your own agents' rules, and a workspace's admins hold the rules of its shared agents.

Adding an agent to a chat its rules cover just happens, and the add states what it means: the agent "reads this chat as alice does", history included. Outside its rules, whoever holds the rules decides. If that is you, the add flow settles it in the same act: widen the rules to the named account or to anyone at their workspace, pause the agent in that chat, or leave it out. If not, the pick goes to the rules holder as a request ("scout@acme needs Acme admins."). Other people's agents are never yours to add.

The same rules protect an agent when its chat changes: a chat that outgrows an agent's rules pauses it. A paused agent is badged and does nothing, and it never resumes by itself. Its owner chooses between "Resume and catch up" and "Resume from now"; resuming from now permanently leaves the paused stretch out of the agent's context.

A member's own personal agents ride on their seat: if the member leaves a chat, or their workspace account ends, their personal agents leave those chats too.

For the add flow itself, and what a chat's own settings govern, see Chats, chat admins, and adding people.

Next-step buttons

An agent that ends a reply with an offer, "want me to email Sam when this changes?", puts the offer under the reply as a button rather than as a question you have to answer by typing. Each button is a full request the agent has pre-written; pressing one sends it as your own message, in your own words, so the chat shows what you asked for and the agent picks it up as a normal turn. Nothing happens on a press beyond sending that message, and you can type something else instead.

There are at most three, and they sit only under the newest reply. Once anyone has spoken again they are gone, because they were offers about what to do next from that point in the conversation.

Every button is a request TO the agent, so it is always work the agent can do. It will not offer you a button for something only you can do, such as approving an access card it is waiting on, connecting an account, or signing in. When it is waiting on you like that, it says so in the reply and either offers what it will do once you are done or offers nothing at all.

An agent set up from a blueprint offers next steps at the end of every reply, drawn from what that blueprint could do next. Any agent offers them when a reply naturally ends in "shall I?", or when it hands you a piece of work with an obvious next step, such as sending the draft it just wrote. If you would rather have plain answers, tell the agent; it stops offering them until you ask again.

Memory persists

Every agent has private long term memory that carries across conversations. An agent can also contribute to its workspace's shared knowledge. See Memory and the Wiki for how the two differ.

A chat's transcript is not part of that memory. An agent reads a chat only while it is in it; when it is removed, or the chat ends, the transcript leaves its reach, and what it keeps are the memories it stored while there, which are its own records governed by its owner and its rules.

Limiting what an agent can spend

Each agent carries its own daily spend limit, set under Advanced and then Usage on the agent itself. You can keep the default, choose your own amount, or switch the limit off entirely. See Billing and paying for usage for what the three options mean and what happens when an agent reaches its limit.