For AI agents, it’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times

And in a desperate attempt to turn a cliche into a sharper analogy to today’s AI era, let’s complete the rest of Charles Dickens’ first line in “A Tale of Two Cities,” which honestly does kind of fit: “… it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

This week was almost all about artificial intelligence and especially AI agents — new products aimed at automating more tasks amid escalating fears that agents could, well, make all that moot for humanity.

First the fears: After last week’s high-profile departures from frontier model companies of researchers worried that runaway AI could “kill us all,” talk continue to swirl about that and other, slightly more prosaic concerns. The rising concerns prompted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk to back Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call for a slowdown in model releases, if not development. Anthropic also released metrics for monitoring how fast AI is advancing.

In light of all that, am I too cynical to suggest that all this talk may be intended to slow a process for controlling AI until after the midterms, when everyone’s attention will get diverted to other concerns? Maybe, but we’ll see. In any case, neither a slowdown nor anything else concerning AI is coming anytime soon from Washington. As Republican Sen. John Kennedy put it when asked about the prospects for an AI bill, “Right now, Congress can’t pass gas.” Alrighty then.