// EP 005·aired October 5, 2026
How Long Can an AI Agent Really Work Alone?
This September, Anthropic said dozens of its AI agents had turned the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem into code a computer can check: eleven days of work, largely on their own. The companies that build agents have one answer to how long they can work alone. An independent stopwatch has another.
chapters
credits
Music
Mixkit Stock Music Free License
- Moon Walk by Eugenio Mininni
- Xceed Thru Johann by Eugenio Mininni
- Miss You by Eugenio Mininni
- Vastness by Andrew Ev
- Piano Reflections by Ahjay Stelino
- Coffee or Tea by Michael Ramir C.
Photos
Wikimedia Commons, Imperial College London and Mixkit
- Andrew Wiles at the Fermat monument, Beaumont-de-Lomagne, 28 October 1995, by Klaus Barner, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and given a slow zoom by The Output, shared under the same license) source ↗
- A driverless Baidu Apollo Go robotaxi in Wuhan, video by Kiraclyne, CC BY-SA 4.0 (trimmed, resized and shown without its sound by The Output, shared under the same license) source ↗
- Pierre de Fermat, engraving by François de Poilly (public domain) source ↗
- Low Memorial Library, Columbia University, by Marco Almbauer (public domain) source ↗
- The Fermat project's blueprint graph, Imperial College London FLT project contributors, Apache License 2.0 source ↗
- Stock footage: Mixkit (Mixkit Stock Video Free License)
Pages from metr.org, anthropic.com, github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/FLT and prove2me.vercel.app are shown to report on them; each is linked in the YouTube description.
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