Do AI Agents Outnumber Humans On Earth? When Will They Form Societies?

InnovationAIDo AI Agents Outnumber Humans On Earth? When Will They Form Societies?ByAmir Husain,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Founder WQ Foundry, SkyGrid (acq. Boeing), SparkCognition (AI Unicorn)Follow AuthorJun 02, 2026, 01:19pm EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.A society of robots and AI agents is near.Visual China Group via Getty ImagesThere are three forms of intelligence that co-exist on Earth today. Humans, animals and artificial intelligence. At what point will the number of artificially intelligent “agents” exceed the number of humans on earth?There are well over three million large AI models available on the premier model hosting site, Hugging Face. That count is climbing by about 3,000 a day, or at a compounding rate near 0.2% a day. This means the catalog roughly doubles every year. Whereas the first million models were accumulated over more than a thousand days, the second took just 335.One proxy for figuring out how many agents might exist as I write this is the number of large model downloads. HF doesn’t publish a clean number for this, so we have to estimate. Treat my work below as a Fermi calculation. The inputs are loose and the answer that matters is the order of magnitude, not the decimal.The most useful public analysis is Loïck Bourdois’s study of the 50 most downloaded entities on Hugging Face. The top 50 represent about 80% of HF downloads, and they have been downloaded about 30B times. Models larger than 1B parameters, which we would consider agent-capable, represent about 8% of total downloads.Putting all this together, there are likely 3B large model downloads from HF alone.Is this 50% of all downloads across the internet? If so, perhaps there are 6B large model downloads in total. Perhaps some of these models are never used. Perhaps some are copied many times and invoked as part of 100 agent workflows....