I’ve read all the stories this week about the dangers of AI. That we have to slow down, because of just how dangerous AI is. I see lots of smart folks falling for the stories and becoming skeptical that it is not just a marketing tactic of these AI companies. Which is partly true, but when you zoom out and consider the wealth of information being omitted and the general ignorance of how technology operates at scale, you are left concerned, but in a very different way.
Agents are just autonomous compute. Not really anything new, you just have a robust knowledge base behind it now by default to help you execute the automation. The cloud really allowed us to rapidly scale our automation, but you still had to deploy the knowledge behind it–AI has combined compute and the knowledge in ways that allow you to crawl, probe, hack, automate, and run a myriad of tasks without really understanding what you have available to you. We are putting this capability into the hands of every individual who wants it. No training or licensing required, the only thing limiting you is what you are willing to spend on your agents.
Next you have large enterprises who have been massively scaling their IT infrastructure for this entire century, rapidly expanding the surface area of the technology they need to operate their businesses. When you combine that with recent efforts to reduce payroll and push teams to do more with less, hire younger lower paid workers who likely weren’t around to build any of these systems. You end up with a very porous, fragile, and sprawling surface area of sites, applications, APIs, and cobbled together 3rd-party services. This makes for an amazingly insecure business surface area that management doesn’t fully understand how it works. These are the people choosing to go all in on artificial intelligence, mandating that their teams use AI for everything.
After that you have a wonderfully exploitative ecosystem of 3rd-party services that are backed by venture capital who are anywhere from their series A through D, which are moving fast and breaking things, while also reaching a point where more profit MUST be extracted to satisfy investors. With each 3rd-party service boring a hole into the firewall of each business, providing another surface area for crawling, probing, and extracting, while also potentially falling short on security, privacy, and what is needed to defend against the onslaught of autonomous compute being unleashed in this moment. The average SaaS or 3rd-party portfolio of companies has massively grown in the last decade, outsourcing business onto the open web.
This is the environment we are framing AI as dangerous in. Is it AI that is dangerous, or the way we do business in 2026? When you give researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other startup access to robust agentic autonomous compute and have it run without rigorous guardrails, or you give your average employee within an enterprise the same robust agentic autonomous compute. What did you think would happen? When business leadership goes all in on using AI for everything after two decades of connecting every part of their physical and virtual business to the Internet. What did you think was going to happen? Every enterprise and startup I’ve had access to internally is a shitshow. Moving fast. Poorly managing risk. Operating completely insecurely about being left behind and rendered meaningless by the market.
Is it AI that we need to slow down, or business. Isn’t that what regulation is for? Finding the right velocity for safely and securely operating businesses within different industries? Yes, we should regulate AI. But we should also be regulating business in general. You can’t be all anti-regulation for business, pro venture capital, and go all in on AI, and then pretend to be concerned about what is happening. AI isn’t dangerous. AI unleashed on half-ass business operations is dangerous. AI unleashed on half-ass Internet enabled supply chains is dangerous. AI unleashed and mandated by management that doesn’t understand AI or their IT operations is dangerous. Let’s stop pretending AI is going to kill us, when there is a laundry list of things that will kill us that we’ve been ignoring for years, but all of a sudden we want to enable with AI.
