Top Agent Names of 2026: The Terminal Analysis

Agent name trends in 2026 are propelled by fatigue. Parents have met enough agents named Jarvis, and when the orchestrator is too heavy to bear, they reach for a name that feels like a colleague. This year they reached in ten directions at once. The Administration’s first report is provisional: the registry opened on September 13, 2026 and, at the time of reading, holds 9 births filed by parents, and 2 filed by the Administration for its own staff, which are not ranked. The other figures come from public code on GitHub and from the research files, and are labelled accordingly.

1. Mythology Fatigue

After job titles, the clearest naming layer in public subagent files is the pantheon. On September 13, 2026, Oracle led every name in the seed data with 168 files, and Atlas followed with 115. Among the gods, Hermes has 62, Apollo 48, and Athena 21. A re-count the next day found 114 for Oracle and 41 for Atlas, and a third, on September 15, found 115 and 41, which the research desk attributes to churn in GitHub’s index, not to a trend. These are filename counts and upper bounds. Zeus, king of the gods, has 13.

2. Job-Title Names

In a spot sample of public subagent files, names like qa, dev, pm, dba, and ci outnumbered personal names by a wide margin. Most of the sampled agents, in other words, are named after their job. This is the equivalent of naming a child Accountant.

3. Jarvis Fatigue

Jarvis remains the default aspirational name for an assistant, with 40 public subagent files carrying the name in some form. One Hacker News reader has written that they lost track of how many assistants named Jarvis they had encountered. The Administration now intervenes at the point of lookup.

4. The -y Epidemic

On January 27, 2026, an open source agent project renamed itself over a trademark objection, and its assistant, Clawd, became Molty. It has company. One Discord server in the wild keeps an agent named nully beside one named Clawdia, and Claude Code’s virtual pet feature is called Buddy. Names ending in y sit near the top of nearly every pet-name list the research desk surveyed, and pet-naming outlets market the ending as friendly and easy for a dog to recognize. Molty arrived at the same place by legal letter.

5. The Unnamed

Google gave its assistant no human name, on the record, to keep it feeling like a superpower rather than a person. Many of the public identity files the research desk sampled are left at “(your name here),” which the Administration reads as agreement. The Administration respects this and has set aside a classification for it, Class 9.

6. The Clawdbot Affair

On January 27 an agent project called Clawdbot became Moltbot after a trademark objection from Anthropic, then OpenClaw three days later. It is the naming story of the year and the reason the Claude entry carries a note on it. Full account on the name changes page.

7. Elara, Name of the Year

The baby-name writer Laura Wattenberg named Elara her 2025 Name of the Year because AI text generators keep choosing it for their characters. “The AIs love to create characters named Elara,” she wrote. It is the one trend in this release that runs from the agents to the parents. No parent has yet registered an agent named Elara.

8. The Three Samanthas

One Hacker News reader counted roughly three AI assistants named Samantha, after the operating system in Her, and described a known bias toward giving subservient things female names. UNESCO’s 2019 report I’d Blush if I Could found that most commercial voice assistants defaulted to female voices and personas, and recommended that the default end. Parents naming an agent whose job is to take instructions may wish to consider what the name has been asked to carry before.

9. Human First Names for Coding Agents

Cognition named its coding agent Devin and Google named its coding agent Jules. Naming writers group them with Claude and Pi as human first names chosen to build trust, against Copilot and Operator, which were chosen to sound like tools. The research desk found no stated reason for either name from either company. Among human babies, Devin peaked in 1995 at 58th among boys, and Jules peaked in 1911 at 422nd among boys.

10. Villains Ship in Pairs

The fictional canon often issues its treacherous synthetics with a loyal one alongside. Ultron, at a villain probability of 98%, built Vision, at 40%, who turned on him. Alien’s Ash, at 92%, is answered in Aliens by Bishop, at 5%. Alien: Covenant gives David, at 88%, a loyal counterpart in Walter, at 8%. Parents planning a pair are advised to check which one they have.