Åström's 1965 POMDP-founding paper frames its problem entirely in control-theory vocabulary and never uses the word "agent"

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Karl Johan Åström's 1965 paper "Optimal Control of Markov Processes with Incomplete State Information" — the paper POMDP historiography traces back to (see claim-kaelbling-1998-cites-astrom-1965-as-pomdp-origin) — states its own motivation in narrowly control-theoretic terms: "The problem discussed in this paper has grown out of an attempt to con-struct a theoretical framework which is suitable for the treatment of some of the problems arising in the design of control systems." Its central technical object is named accordingly: the choice parameters are "combined to form a column vector u, and called contral [control] variables or decision variables," and the mapping from observations to controls "is referred to as strategy or a control law." The word "agent" does not occur anywhere in the paper's text.

This matches Åström's own biographical account of the period. He joined IBM's Nordic Laboratory in 1961 "to work on theory and applications of computerized process control," and by the paper's 1965 publication "he was responsible for modeling, identification, and implementation of systems for computer control of paper machines" (his own department's CV page). His later retrospective on the same era frames the underlying Billerud-IBM paper-mill project as motivated by the observation that "stochastic control theory is a natural formulation of industrial regulation problems" — industrial regulation, not decision-making agency as a general category.

The paper's own vocabulary is consistent throughout: control systems, control variables, control laws, strategies. No artificial-intelligence framing, and no anticipation of the "agent" vocabulary that Kaelbling, Littman & Cassandra's 1998 paper — and, sixty-one years later, 2026 LLM-agent papers (claim-2026-comap-paper-formalizes-llm-agent-as-pomdp) — would layer onto the same mathematical object.