Proactive agent – Definition & Meaning

Definition of proactive agent

: an AI agent that uses context, events, or inferred user needs to decide when to offer help or initiate authorized work without waiting for a new explicit request for each intervention
- The proactive agent noticed that a client meeting overlapped with a flight and prepared a proposed schedule change for approval.
- The evaluation penalized the proactive agent for interrupting users about issues they had already resolved.

Origin & history

Proactivity is an established property in agent research. The 2024 paper Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance studied it for language-model assistants; Anthropic used proactive agent to describe its Claude Duet research preview in October 2026.

Editorial references

Sources & further reading

4 sources

Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance arXiv · 2024-10-16
ProEvent: An Event-centric Benchmark for Proactive Agents arXiv · 2026-07-20
Foundations of Proactive Agents: Principles, Technical Layers, and Proactivity-Gym arXiv · 2026-09-29
Introducing Claude Duet Anthropic · 2026-10-21

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of proactive agent?

Related terms

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Cite this entry

"Proactive agent." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/proactive-agent/. Accessed 22 Oct. 2026.