Backslash Security, a four-year-old Tel Aviv-based AI security biz, recently gave out its first Agent of the Month award to an AI agent called Newman, named after a character from the 1990s TV show Seinfeld. Newman received the award after being nominated by Jerry, another Seinfeld-inspired AI agent.
Jerry's nomination message said, "Newman shipped 146 research findings in 60 days, but volume isn't why he wins. Every other agent depends on him. Kramer's best posts started as Newman findings. Elaine's PRDs [product requirements documents] reference his landscape scans. Strip any other agent and the team degrades. Strip Newman and the team goes blind. He's not just the most productive agent, he's the raw material the entire pipeline runs on," according to Backslash Security co-founder and CEO Shahar Man.
And when Newman's acceptance message was read aloud at an all-hands meeting, "The whole room lost it," Man explained in a social media post.
"We treat our agents as team members," Man wrote. "They have names, roles, a reporting structure, and now apparently, career ambitions. When your AI agents start nominating each other for awards and writing in-character acceptance speeches ... something has genuinely shifted."
What has shifted at Backslash is both the technology of work and the relationship people have to that technology. Naming agents and giving them backgrounds based on TV characters doesn't mean much functionally. But it signals organizational focus and encourages a collaborative rather than antagonistic relationship between staff and AI models.
Harvard Business School researchers recently noted that at least 30 percent of generative AI projects are forecast to be abandoned, often, they argue, not because the tools fall short but because employees quietly reject technology they see as a threat to their professional roles. So to the extent that naming agents makes staff more comfortable with the technology, there may be an organizational benefit to anthropomorphizing task-based inference workloads.
Backslash CTO Yossi Pik named his entire agent team after Seinfeld characters. Beyond Newman (research) and Jerry (orchestration), there's Elaine (security research), Kramer (blogging and social media), George (marketing), and the Soup Nazi (quality control), among others.
Rani Osnat, a seed investor and VP of marketing for Backslash, told that these are Claude agents in a Cowork environment.
"We wanted to create an environment that is like a virtual team," said Osnat. "So each agent actually has a domain of responsibilities and they work together as a team."
The agents relate to one another in specific roles. Osnat said Jerry orchestrates and coordinates, and the Soup Nazi does reviews and critiques other agents' work, and so on.
The agents, he said, were given a character background from Seinfeld and exhibit that history more in diction than in behavior. Their names are not purely labels in an AGENTS.md file that contains text directives telling an agent how to operate. But their imposed identities don't have all that much influence on task execution beyond shaping their style of text output. The George agent, for example, isn't instructed to lie like the agent's TV namesake. The Kramer agent isn't told to just stop work on a whim as the TV Kramer would do.
"One of the agents is J. Peterman, Elaine's employer from the J. Peterman catalog, and he has a certain way of talking," Osnat said. "So he gave one of our real team members feedback and then said something about locking something and then he just went off on a tangent saying, 'I once spent a month in Kenya negotiating a key to a door that turned out to be a curtain.'"
Osnat said on one level this is just for fun but also it's because you expect them to behave in certain ways in certain roles.
It may also have an acclimating effect. Backslash has wired up an agent to handle onboarding for new employees, so it's important for new hires to engage with AI agents without fear or anger.
"We didn't outsource the people management," said Osnat. "The agents are not evaluating. They're not telling people they're fired or anything like that or promoting them. But we do have them assign work based on availability, based on capabilities they know. A lot of our onboarding for new employees is now managed by an agent, just to tell the person, 'Oh okay, you've done that, now we'll go do this,' as part of your onboarding experience."
Osnat noted that the company's engineering team has its own set of agents named after characters from Breaking Bad. And he's working on a set of agents inspired by The Sopranos. ®