The AI industry’s latest attempt to create a business model that actually makes money is framed as “agents” – a convenient marketing term that describes an AI product that executes a process on your behalf without direct human instruction and often requires access to your emails, messages, credit card transactions, location history, and previous chat history with that company. In the last few weeks, Meta and OpenAI rolled out consumer–facing agents, both branded like kids’ toys and obviously targeting kids (but don’t ask Meta about that; that’s very offensive). They are sold as some version of empowerment. Still, they are built on an imbalanced economy, built on tracking and invasive data collection by people who have repeatedly shown a preference for speed and market lock-in over consumer usefulness or safety. These devices are brought to you by the people who think you should accept “some bad things happening” to you so their product can succeed. For years, companies have followed people across websites, apps, and devices to build detailed profiles used for advertising. Those profiles can include sensitive inferences about finances, health, location, interests, and behavior. It’s worse here as they are built on people’s personal interactions with a chatbot – meaning they go beyond signals to make inferences and target you with a product or coupon based on fears, insecurities, or challenges you may have shared with the chatbot product previously. It is an amazing deal for tech companies.