Harness in AI Agents
Towards AI
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Generative AI
A harness in AI agents is the runtime and control plane that turns a raw model into something that can actually do work. In Anthropic’s wording, an agent harness or scaffold is the system that enables a model to act as an agent by processing inputs, orchestrating tool calls, and returning results, while OpenAI describes the harness as the control plane around the model that owns the loop, tool routing, approvals, tracing, recovery, and run state.