If you go to an embodied AI seminar this month, you will probably hear the phrase “multi-agent system” used twice within the same hour — once to describe a team of humanoids learning a soccer policy with MAPPO1, and once to describe a swarm of GPT-5.5 “agents” spawned by OpenClaw2 to write a software project.
The two settings share almost nothing beyond the noun. And yet the noun is doing all the work. Conferences, grant calls, internal roadmaps, and breathless tech-press articles routinely flatten them into a single object of study. The result is a steady leak of claims, benchmarks, and engineering arguments across a category boundary that should not be crossed.
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