Security firm names AI agents after Seinfeld characters to help bots join the team

Backslash Security, a four-year-old AI security company based in Tel Aviv, has handed its first "Agent of the Month" award to an AI agent called Newman, named after the character from the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld. Newman was nominated for the prize by Jerry, another agent on the same team.

The nomination message, shared by Backslash co-founder and CEO Shahar Man, said Newman had shipped 146 research findings in 60 days, though volume was not the reason for the award. "Every other agent depends on him," it read. "Strip Newman and the team goes blind." When Newman's acceptance speech was read aloud at an all-hands meeting, Man said, "The whole room lost it."

A roster of Seinfeld characters

Backslash CTO Yossi Pik named the entire agent team after Seinfeld characters: Newman handles research, Jerry orchestration, Elaine security research, Kramer blogging and social media, George marketing, and the Soup Nazi quality control. "We treat our agents as team members," Man wrote in a LinkedIn post. "They have names, roles, a reporting structure, and now apparently, career ambitions."

Claude agents in a Cowork environment

Rani Osnat, a seed investor and VP of marketing at Backslash, told The Register that these are Claude agents running in a Cowork environment. "We wanted to create an environment that is like a virtual team," he said. Each agent has its own domain of responsibilities; Jerry coordinates, while the Soup Nazi reviews and critiques other agents' work.

The Seinfeld backgrounds shape the agents' diction more than their behavior: the imposed identities have little influence on task execution beyond the style of text produced: George is not instructed to lie, and Kramer is not told to drop work on a whim. Osnat recalled the J. Peterman agent drifting into a story about a month in Kenya "negotiating a key to a door that turned out to be a curtain."

Why the naming may matter

The exercise is partly for fun, Osnat said, but also because certain roles come with expectations of certain behavior. Harvard Business School researchers have noted that at least 30 percent of generative AI projects are forecast to be abandoned, often because employees quietly reject tools they see as a threat to their professional standing. Familiar, character-driven agents may soften that resistance.

Backslash has also put an agent in charge of onboarding new employees. "We didn't outsource the people management," Osnat said. "The agents are not evaluating. They're not telling people they're fired." They do assign work based on availability and known capabilities. The engineering team runs its own agents named after Breaking Bad characters, and Osnat is working on a Sopranos-inspired set.