Anthropic's Claude Duet joins xAI's Grok Bot and OpenAI's Dots: three rival labs now sell agents that work in the background and act without being asked. Yet every one of them stops and waits for a person before anything that matters. Magnus Oxenwaldt explains why capability is no longer the hard part. The hard part is the rails: identities for agents, spending limits, approval points, readable logs and a way to undo mistakes. Walmart's Agent Gateway shows what those rails look like, banks and Sweden's Government Offices show what happens when they are missing, and attackers running agents with no limits at all show why the work cannot wait.
Highlights:
• Duet, Grok Bot and Dots: proactive agents are now a category, and all of them stop for a human yes
• Walmart's Agent Gateway: an identity, a spending limit and a returns process for every agent
• Agent Skills moves to the Linux Foundation's Agentic AI Foundation
• Banks and Sweden's Government Offices keep agents out where the rules are missing
• Attackers' agents run unsupervised, and an AI safety test went wrong because a person drew the line in the wrong place
• Four questions for your AI roadmap: who owns the rails?
Two books. Two different questions.
AI Don't Fix Stupidity asks what the organisation has to become. AI Don't Make You Smarter asks who you have to become inside it.
Books and formats: https://oxenwaldt.com/books
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