By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, Sept 16 (Reuters) - China's Huawei expects autonomous agents to account for more than 90% of global AI token traffic by 2035, requiring huge increases in computing power alongside new systems to keep independent software secure and controllable.
Annual consumption of AI tokens, the units models process when receiving and generating information, will skyrocket over the next decade as agents continuously perceive their surroundings, reason, make decisions and call external tools, the Chinese tech and telecoms giant said on Wednesday.
Leading AI researchers and executives in the U.S. have called for slowing frontier development after rogue agent incidents and warnings that future systems able to autonomously operate hardware and acquire resources could become difficult for humans to control.
Huawei's "Intelligent World 2035: Turning Vision into Action" report makes no call to slow development. Instead, it assumes agent capabilities and deployment will expand dramatically and lists security and privacy protection for autonomous agents among 10 technologies needed to support this.
The approach reflects a wider divide over AI pacing. While parts of the U.S. technology industry are debating coordinated limits on how quickly frontier capabilities improve, China has generally sought to accelerate AI adoption across its economy, while building technical standards around emerging risks.
Huawei said moving AI into the physical world would be essential to achieving artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which generally refers to systems able to perform a broad range of tasks at or beyond human levels.
HUAWEI EXPECTS 900 BILLION AI AGENTS BY 2035
The Huawei report builds on its earlier forecast that 900 billion AI agents could be active globally by 2035, roughly 100 times the projected human population.
Huawei is also deploying agents as part of a security response. It launched an autonomous security-operations platform in April using sensing and enforcement agents to detect and respond to cyber threats, and has published proposals for AI firewalls aimed at protecting enterprise AI systems.
Guo Ping, chairman of Huawei's supervisory board, told employees in remarks released on Tuesday it viewed AI as the company's "biggest opportunity" and wanted its computing infrastructure to become China's equivalent of U.S. chipmaking giant Nvidia.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Alexander Smith)