Anthropic tightens usage policies for Claude Max in third-party apps, prompting builders to adopt model-agnostic orchestration and BYO-key defaults to mitigate platform risks. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is evolving into a key tooling plane with OpenAI MCP Server and mcp-cli enhancing tool discovery and token efficiency. The concept of skills as modular, versioned behaviors gains traction, with implementations in Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cline adding websearch tooling.

AI21 Labs addresses concurrency challenges in agent workspaces using git worktrees for transactional parallel writes, while long-horizon agents focus on context engineering and persistent file-centric workspaces.