AI Agents Can Now Act for You. Who Is Going to Keep Them in Check?
For most of the Internet era, giving a website access to your digital life was a relatively benign thing to do. You might allow a budgeting app to track your spending, give a travel app access to your calendar, or let an email service scan your inbox to filter out spam. The software could see things, organize important information, and make recommendations. But for the most part, a human was still required to press a button to get a result.
But with the recent release of Muse from Meta Platforms and its astounding acceptance among consumers, artificial intelligence is beginning to change this relationship entirely. Until now, most consumer AI apps were used to answer questions and perform deep research. But Meta’s new personal agent is designed to do a lot more with minimal human intervention and oversight, which begs the question: who is going to keep the agents in check?
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For decades, the software that cybersecurity companies have built has primarily been designed to prevent other people from gaining unauthorized access to our digital lives. But agentic AI introduces an entirely different challenge, as we are the ones voluntarily handing the software the keys.
Identity has long been one of the foundational concepts in online security. Before someone can access a bank account, make a purchase, or access their health data, the website they’re interacting with generally wants to establish that they are human and that they are authorized to be there, which works seamlessly when the person logging in and the person requesting the action are the same individual.
But agentic AI breaks that logic, and the consequence of making a mistake could be considerable. For instance, an agent that has been asked to research a stock may then decide to go a step further and place a trade on the owner’s behalf. Whether that trade makes money or not, it could have tremendous consequences, which are typically irreversible.
To its credit, Meta says that it has built a dedicated security architecture around its Muse agents with isolated storage for data and login credentials. But there lies the dilemma. Can the company charged with building and monetizing the AI agent be trusted to also fully secure it, or will consumers need their own independent security layer to limit their agent’s access and provide oversight?
Historically, selling cybersecurity tools to consumers has proven difficult. But with the rise of antivirus programs, identity-theft monitoring, and password managers, perhaps the rise of AI agents targeting consumers creates an entirely new opportunity for software providers and investors.
As AI agents become more widely adopted and more capable, consumers may eventually decide to shift their focus from how novel they are to finding a simple way to set limits and maintain control. And if the current excitement and staggering adoption rates hold, Muse and similar agents could create an entirely new market for the companies that figure out how to solve it.
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Malcolm Ethridge is the Managing Partner at Capital Area Planning Group, based in Washington, D.C. His areas of expertise include retirement planning, investment portfolio development, tax planning, insurance, equity compensation and other executive benefits.
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