AI agents in research: when productivity comes at the cost of apprenticeship
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In the past few months, we have worked extensively with the artificial-intelligence assistants Claude Code and OpenClaw on various research projects. They have been the perfect assistants that any researcher would want: they are always available, can review literature, grasp our guidance quickly and can debug complex codes in minutes or hours, rather than weeks or months. It’s tempting to outsource most data collection, cleaning and curation to these tools. We doubt we are alone in feeling this way.
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Nature 653, 322 (2026)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01440-9
Competing Interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
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