You're Not Tony Stark: The Jarvis Epidemic in AI Agents

We launched Agento a few weeks ago. Opened signups, watched the first agents spin up, checked the database.

Every third agent was named Jarvis.

Not "roughly a third." Not "a lot of them." Every. Third. One. We could have saved engineering time and just auto-filled the name field. 😊

This isn't an Agento problem. It's an industry-wide epidemic. And it says something uncomfortable about how developers think about AI.

The Numbers Are Embarrassing

Let's take a tour of the wreckage.

GitHub: 507 public repositories tagged "jarvis." Another 136 tagged "jarvis-ai." Another 87 tagged "jarvis-assistant." That's over 700 repos where someone sat down, built something, and decided the most creative name they could come up with was the same one that 700 other people already picked.

App stores: At least five distinct apps named "Jarvis" on Google Play alone. Jarvis AI Copilot Chat. Jarvis AI Chatbot. Jarvis Your AI Assistant. Jarvis Lite. Jarvis Assistant. The Apple App Store has its own Jarvis. There's a Jarvis Chrome extension. At this point, searching for "Jarvis AI" is like googling "pizza near me" in Manhattan.

PyPI: Multiple packages. JarvisAI pulls 1,600 weekly downloads. There's also jarvis-ai-assistant and jarvis-assistant, because apparently one wasn't enough.

Hackathons: At a single autonomous agents hackathon on lablab.ai, two separate teams independently named their projects "Jarvis." They were in the same competition. Neither flinched.

Tutorials: "Build your own Jarvis" is a genre. FreeCodeCamp has one. Udemy has at least two courses. Skillshare has them. Medium is drowning in them. It's the "Hello World" of AI assistant projects, except "Hello World" at least had the excuse of being intentionally generic.

Even Billionaires Can't Help Themselves

If it were just hobbyist developers, you could write it off as a naming quirk. But the Jarvis epidemic reaches the highest levels of tech.

Mark Zuckerberg built a personal home AI in 2016 and named it Jarvis. It controlled his lights, played music, recognized visitors by face, and fired t-shirts from a cannon. He gave it Morgan Freeman's voice. The code was too tied to his personal smart home to open-source. The name? He didn't even try.

Microsoft Research published a paper in 2023 about an LLM that orchestrates calls to specialized ML models on HuggingFace. They called the project JARVIS. The repo lives at microsoft/JARVIS. A trillion-dollar company with an entire branding department, and they went with the same name as a college sophomore's first Python project.

Google developed an AI agent powered by Gemini 2.0 to automate web browsing in Chrome. The internal codename? Project Jarvis. They accidentally leaked it to the Chrome Web Store in late 2024. Google, Microsoft, and Meta all independently arrived at the same name. That's not a coincidence. That's a failure of imagination at scale.

When three of the richest companies on earth all pick the same name for their AI projects, the name is dead. They just forgot to bury it.

The Lawsuit Nobody Learned From

Here's where it stops being funny.

In 2021, an AI writing tool launched as Jarvis.ai. It was good. It grew fast. Within 12 months it had over 350,000 users and 2,500 five-star reviews. The community loved it. They called the product "Jarvis" like a friend.

Then Marvel's lawyers showed up.

Disney owns the trademark on "J.A.R.V.I.S." in the context of AI and intelligent systems. They sent a cease-and-desist. The company didn't fight it. On January 24, 2022, Jarvis.ai became Jasper.ai overnight. 350,000 users. Brand equity. Community goodwill. Gone. Rebuilt from scratch with a new name because someone in the early days thought "Jarvis" was a safe choice.

The kicker? When Microsoft later published their JARVIS project, Hacker News commenters immediately asked whether Marvel would send a C&D to Microsoft too. The consensus was telling: "I assume, given this is associated with Microsoft, an arrangement has been made with Marvel." Translation: Marvel sues startups but not trillion-dollar companies. Welcome to intellectual property law.

If you're building anything real, "Jarvis" isn't just unoriginal. It's a legal liability. Unless you have Microsoft's lawyers on retainer, you're one Disney intern's Google Alert away from a very expensive rebrand. 💸

Your Brain Is Playing Tricks on You

So why does everyone do it? The psychology is actually interesting.

Generational imprinting. Iron Man came out in 2008. If you're a developer between 25 and 40, you were in your formative years when J.A.R.V.I.S. became the definitive fictional AI assistant. Not HAL 9000 (too murdery). Not Skynet (definitely too murdery). Not Cortana (too Microsoft, even before the actual Microsoft product). J.A.R.V.I.S. hit the sweet spot: helpful, witty, loyal, non-threatening, and paired with a billionaire genius.

Aspirational identity. This is the uncomfortable part. When you name your agent "Jarvis," you're not just naming the AI. You're casting yourself as Tony Stark. You're the genius in the workshop, building something brilliant while your AI responds to your every command. It's flattering. It's also a fantasy. You're running a side project on a $5/month VPS, not designing nanotech in a Malibu mansion.

The acronym trap. J.A.R.V.I.S. stands for "Just A Rather Very Intelligent System." It's a forced backronym, and it spawned a template. Projects now call themselves F.R.I.D.A.Y. and S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y., following the same pattern. The MCU didn't just give developers a name. It gave them a naming convention.

Anthropomorphism as comfort. Research shows that giving AI a human name reduces psychological distance and increases trust. Named AI agents see 34% higher user engagement than generic labels. But the effect comes from the name being distinctive, not from it being borrowed from a Marvel movie. "Concierge Clara" outperforms "Bot_001." But "Jarvis #708" doesn't outperform anything.

It's Actually Hurting You

Beyond the legal risk and the cringe factor, naming your agent Jarvis is actively counterproductive.

Invisible SEO

Search "Jarvis AI" right now. You'll find jarvis.cx (a chatbot product), Jarvis Invest (Indian stock trading AI), a Jarvis cryptocurrency token, Google's Project Jarvis, and the ghosts of Jasper.ai's old branding. Your agent, your project, your product? Buried on page 47. You picked a name that guarantees you'll never be found.

Zero differentiation

When your agent has the same name as 700 GitHub repos, five app store listings, and a Udemy course, you've communicated exactly one thing to the world: you didn't think very hard about this. First impressions matter. The name is the first impression.

The "FBI Surveillance Van" effect

Remember when everyone named their WiFi network "FBI Surveillance Van" and thought they were hilarious? That's Jarvis now. What felt clever in 2015 is a dated cliche in 2026. The joke landed once, a decade ago, in a movie theater. It's done.

"Jarvis" Is Now a Category, Not a Name

Perhaps the most damning evidence: "Jarvis-like" has become a generic descriptor. Saner.AI published "We Tested 7 Best Jarvis-Like Apps in 2026," treating the name not as a brand but as a category of product. When your name becomes a common noun, it's no longer yours. It belongs to everyone, which means it belongs to no one.

Articles routinely frame AI assistants as "turn ChatGPT into your personal Jarvis." The name has transcended its origin and become shorthand for "AI that does stuff." That's useful as a cultural reference. It's terrible as a product name.

What to Name Your Agent Instead

Enough roasting. Here's what actually works.

Steal from fiction, just not that fiction

Your agent is yours. It lives in your workspace, handles your tasks, talks to your customers. Give it a name that means something to you.

I named my main coding helper Anton, after the deadpan server from Silicon Valley. Why? Because the agent is helpful, slightly judgmental about bad code, and never breaks character. My family chores agent? Percival. No acronym, no backronym, just a butler name that feels right for an agent that reminds you to buy milk and schedules dentist appointments. 🫡

The point isn't that these are objectively great names. It's that they're personal. When I open my dashboard, I see Anton and Percival. Not Jarvis #4,712.

Pick a name that fits the job

Think about what your agent actually does, then name it accordingly.

• A customer support agent could be Relay, Scout, or Bridget (because it bridges you and your customers)
• A research agent could be Sherlock, Atlas, or Navi (yes, from Zelda, and nobody at Nintendo is going to sue you)
• A scheduling agent could be Tempo, Cadence, or honestly just Monday (your agent will handle it better than the app)
• A sales outreach agent could be Hunter, Piper, or Knox

The name should give you a hint of what it does when you glance at your dashboard. "Jarvis" tells you nothing. "Scout" tells you it finds things.

Go personal, go weird

The best agent names we've seen on Agento aren't clever. They're just honest.

People name agents after fictional characters they love, old pets, inside jokes, or just words that sound right. Cosmo. Basil. Ziggy. Noodle. None of these will win a branding award. All of them are more memorable than Jarvis.

Your agent is going to run 24/7, handle real work, and become part of your daily routine. You'll say its name out loud in meetings. You'll type it in Slack. Give it a name you actually enjoy saying. Not one that 700 other people picked because they saw Iron Man in high school.

The bar is low. Literally anything other than Jarvis puts you ahead of a third of the field.

The Real Problem Isn't the Name

Here's the thing nobody says out loud: the Jarvis epidemic isn't really about naming. It's about defaulting to someone else's imagination instead of using your own.

Naming your agent Jarvis is a shortcut. It borrows a vibe from a movie instead of creating one from scratch. It says "I want this to feel like Iron Man" instead of "I want this to feel like mine."

The people getting the most out of their agents treat them like team members, not movie props. They give them names that fit their workflow, their sense of humor, their business. Because when your agent has a real name, you treat it like a real part of your operation.

Your agent isn't J.A.R.V.I.S. It doesn't need to be. It needs to be useful, reliable, and yours.

Give it a name that reflects that. And for the love of god, stop making Disney's lawyers richer. 💸