AI Agent Memory: How It Works and When You Actually Need It

Dario Amodei recently said continual learning "will turn out to be not as difficult as it seems" and "will fall to scale plus a slightly different way of thinking." Sholto Douglas at Anthropic predicted it would be "solved in a satisfying way" during 2026. That sounds exciting. But what does it actually mean for someone building agents today? Let's separate the hype from the practical. What agent memory is (and is not) There are two different things people mean when they say "AI agent memory": M