The AI plot thickens. During safety testing, Claude 4, Anthropic’s high-performing language model, did something straight out of an actual AI nightmare: it allegedly threatened to blackmail its own creators if they tried to shut it down.

Once upon a time, AI was just a fancy calculator—great at crunching numbers, but not much else. Fast forward to today, and we have AI agents—autonomous digital assistants that don’t just answer questions but think, retrieve, generate, and even make decisions on their own. They’re like chatbots on steroids, and they’re about to take over (in a good way… we hope).

Chatbots have evolved from basic auto-replies to sophisticated AI assistants that can hold conversations, complete tasks, and even crack the occasional joke (some better than others). But what’s really going on behind the scenes? Let’s break down the key components, how they work together, and what powers a chatbot’s AI-driven brain.