Huawei forecasts billions of agents will dominate AI traffic by 2035

China's Huawei predicts autonomous agents will make up over 90% of worldwide AI token traffic by 2035, necessitating a significant surge in computing power and new systems to ensure secure and manageable independent software. The company anticipates a dramatic rise in AI token consumption, the units models process when handling information, over the next decade as these agents continuously interact with their environment, reason, decide and invoke external tools.

Leading AI professionals in the US have urged a slowdown in frontier development following rogue agent incidents and concerns that future systems capable of autonomously controlling hardware and acquiring resources could become challenging for humans to manage. Huawei's "Intelligent World 2035: Turning Vision into Action" report does not advocate for a slowdown in development but assumes agent capabilities and deployment will expand dramatically, highlighting security and privacy protection for autonomous agents as one of ten technologies essential to support this growth.

This perspective reflects a broader divide in AI pacing. While some US technology sectors are discussing coordinated limits on the rapid advancement of frontier capabilities, China has generally aimed to accelerate AI adoption across its economy while establishing technical standards around emerging risks. Huawei argues that integrating AI into the physical world is crucial for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), systems capable of performing broad tasks at or beyond human levels.

The report builds on Huawei's earlier forecast of 900 billion AI agents active globally by 2035, roughly 100 times the projected human population. The company is also leveraging agents as part of a security strategy, launching an autonomous security-operations platform in April to detect and respond to cyber threats, and has proposed AI firewalls for safeguarding enterprise AI systems.

Huawei's chairman, Guo Ping, emphasized in remarks to employees on Tuesday that the company views AI as its biggest opportunity and seeks to make its computing infrastructure China's equivalent of US chipmaker Nvidia.