February 2026 AI Roundup: Agents Take the Wheel

February was the month things moved from interesting to consequential. Agents got their own environments to operate in, the economics of running them flipped, and the wider world started pushing back on all of it. Agents Got Computers Cursor, Perplexity, and OpenAI all shipped independently this month and all landed at the same conclusion. Agents shouldn't just assist you from inside your existing tools. They should have their own environment, their own context, and their own way of showing you what they did. Cursor Cloud Agents are the clearest version of this. You assign a task, the agent spins up in its own cloud VM, writes the code, tests it, and comes back with a video demo and a merge ready PR. You're not reviewing a diff. You're watching the feature run. A meaningful chunk of Cursor's own merged PRs now come from these agents. Perplexity had been quiet for a while before dropping Perplexity Computer , a general purpose digital worker that routes tasks across a fleet of models, r