China's Huawei forecasts billions of agents will dominate AI traffic by 2035

China's Huawei predicts autonomous agents will dominate AI traffic by 2035, comprising more than 90% of global AI token traffic. This surge in autonomous agents will require significant increases in computing power and new systems to ensure their secure and controllable operation. Annual consumption of AI tokens, the units models process when receiving and generating information, is expected to skyrocket as agents continuously perceive their surroundings, reason, make decisions, and call external tools.

Leading AI researchers and executives in the United States have called for slowing frontier development following incidents involving rogue agents and warnings that future systems capable of independently operating hardware and acquiring resources could become challenging for humans to control. However, Huawei's "Intelligent World 2035: Turning Vision into Action" report does not advocate for slowing development; instead, it anticipates a dramatic expansion of agent capabilities and deployment, identifying security and privacy protection for autonomous agents as one of 10 technologies necessary to support this growth.

The report reflects a broader divide in approach to AI pacing between China and the United States. While some in the U.S. technology industry are debating coordinated limits on the rapid improvement of frontier capabilities, China has generally aimed to accelerate AI adoption across its economy while simultaneously developing technical standards to address emerging risks.

Huawei believes integrating AI into the physical world is essential for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), or systems capable of performing a broad range of tasks at or beyond human levels. The report projects that there could be 900 billion AI agents globally by 2035, about 100 times the projected human population.

In addition to its AI development ambitions, Huawei is deploying autonomous agents as part of a security response. In April, the company launched an autonomous security-operations platform using sensing and enforcement agents to detect and respond to cyber threats. Huawei has also proposed AI firewalls to protect enterprise AI systems.

Guo Ping, chairman of Huawei's supervisory board, recently stated in remarks to employees that AI is the company's biggest opportunity, aiming for its computing infrastructure to become China's equivalent of U.S. chipmaking giant Nvidia.