AI agents are fast gaining autonomy. What could go right and wrong?

LLM agents don’t have much of a track record yet, but to hear CEOs tell it, they will transform the economy—and soon. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says agents might “join the workforce” this year, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is aggressively promoting Agentforce, a platform that allows businesses to tailor agents to their own purposes.

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Scholars, too, are taking agents seriously. “Agents are the next frontier,” says Dawn Song, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. But, she says, “in order for us to really benefit from AI…we need to figure out how to make them work safely and securely.” 

That’s a tall order. Like chatbot LLMs, agents can be chaotic and unpredictable. In the near future, an agent with access to your bank account could help you manage your budget, but it might also spend all your savings or leak your information to a hacker. 

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[A]gents aren’t so different from interns or personal assistants—except, of course, that they aren’t human. And that’s where much of the trouble begins.

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