A team from Hugging Face has launched a freely available, cloud-hosted AI "agent" for computer use. However, a word of caution: it tends to be fairly slow and occasionally makes mistakes.

Hugging Face's agent, known as Open Computer Agent, can be accessed via the web and operates a Linux virtual machine preloaded with several applications, including Firefox. Similar to OpenAI’s Operator, you can prompt the Open Computer Agent to complete tasks — for instance, “Use Google Maps to find the Hugging Face headquarters in Paris” — then sit back while the agent opens the necessary programs and figures out the required steps.

Open Computer Agent handles simple requests fairly well. However, more complex tests, such as searching for flights, stumbled during TechCrunch's evaluation. It also frequently encounters CAPTCHA tests that it cannot resolve.

You will also need to wait in a virtual queue to use the Open Computer Agent, with wait times ranging from a few seconds to several minutes, depending on demand.

Of course, the goal of the Hugging Face team was not to build the most advanced computer-use agent. Instead, they wanted to demonstrate the growing capabilities of open AI models and how their operation on cloud infrastructure is becoming increasingly cost-effective.

"As vision models become more powerful, they are able to support complex agent workflows," wrote Aymeric Roucher, a member of the Hugging Face agent team, in a post on X. "[Some of these models] support built-in grounding, meaning [they] can locate any element in an image through coordinates, [and] [can] click on any item within the [virtual machine]."

Although agent technology is far from perfect, it is attracting increasing investment as companies look to adopt agents to boost productivity. According to a recent survey by KPMG, 65% of companies are experimenting with AI agents. Markets and Markets predicts that the AI agent segment will grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030.