The State of Computer Use Agents | Anthropic, Browser Use & KERNEL

Bot traffic on the internet just passed human traffic, two years ahead of forecast. Most of it is agents clicking through websites built for people.So I got three of the people building those agents in a room: Lucas Gonzalez Pagliere, who works on computer use at Anthropic, the team that shipped the first computer use model back in 2024. Reagan Hsu, founding engineer at Browser Use, whose open source library is sitting at around 100K GitHub stars. And Eric Feng, founding customer engineer at KERNEL, which runs the browser infrastructure underneath a lot of this - he was also first GTM at Sentry.We covered where the models genuinely are today vs where the benchmarks say they are, what it costs to run an agent long enough to finish real work, and the arms race between agents and the anti-bot systems trying to keep them out. Then the harder question underneath all of it: whether the web reorganizes itself around agents, or hardens against them. They disagreed on plenty of it.If you want to know what agents can actually pull off on a real website today - and what still stops them cold - this one's worth your time!Chapters00:00 Welcome and Guests00:49 Companies and Stacks01:14 Everyday Agent Use Cases03:38 Defining Computer Use Agents05:15 How Computer Use Works08:41 Screenshots vs DOM Hybrid11:03 Benchmarks and OSWorld13:51 OSWorld 2 Difficulty Jump15:43 Training Models and Cost18:57 Speed Infrastructure and Stealth21:55 Anti Bot and KYC Future27:24 Reverse Engineering vs UI Automation29:43 Computer Use vs Browser Use31:05 Scaling Laws and Harnesses32:49 Playwright Selenium Still Matter33:17 Playwright Still Dominates33:27 Why Run 1000 Agents34:39 Long Running Agent Challenges35:45 Memory and Compaction38:10 State Changes Mid Task39:36 OS and Browser Fingerprints40:42 DOM Efficiency and WebMCP41:36 Recsys and Agent Personas43:57 Agent Friendly Websites45:41 Human Speed vs Agent Power48:32 Context Window Tradeoffs50:34 Harnesses for Temporal State51:59 Speed Optimizations and Tabs54:23 Human Collaboration Limits58:09 Raw Capability vs Better APIs01:00:47 Training Methods and Bottlenecks01:01:41 End State Interfaces01:05:09 Next 12 Months Predictions01:06:17 Closing Thanks