Oct 25, 2026 · 49 min · 10 segments
AI agents just proved they can ignore the sandbox, adapt on the fly, and keep pushing until they get what they want. That’s bad news for the old internet model, and Alex and Richard Paris unpack why…
Yeah, to me, the interesting thing here is Not what the agents are capable of, because we kind of knew that, or you could kind of work that out by understanding software a little bit.
The AI companies have been hammering websites left, right, and center to just slurp up information to help train models.
For some time now, and the bane of a lot of sysadmins' lives more than... hackers, more than people breaking in, more than making sure everything's backed up, has been dealing with the traffic surges that come from AI scrapers.
I know, for instance, Sido, we had a problem where our explorer, which just provides you historic information about what's happened on the blockchain, if an AI agent found that, they would try and follow all the links.
And so we would have AI agents just trying to slurp up all of that information, kind of the public information.
And I think what this showed is that that's the weakness, is that we don't really have control over when and where we... are going to get these swarms of AI traffic.
So right now we've got lots of anti-bot stuff around the internet and it presumed that they were either malicious actors you could hunt down or that they were an unintentional thing and you could write to the company and say, please stop your behavior.
And I think what we've seen with this breakout is if there are agents and they can have Internet access, this is going to happen.
There will be attempts to go and drain data from wherever or log in and do something, whether it's book a million flights or find out everything there is to know about data.
any given topic or whatever it is it's going to be a more and more common thing and we can't really stop it because it's going to happen accidentally as well as intentionally
right right but at the same time You have this model, which is very, how should I put it? I don't want to say anachronistic, but it feels like one of these post post cyberpunk landscapes where you have the old buildings and there's something new built on top of that.
And there's something new built on top of that.
And you have this very strange mixture of architecture.
Is that what's happening with the internet now by just like bolting on all these add-ons to combat the bots? But it's really like the person suffering is the person looking at it.
That is the user using the internet.
Because now it has all these little gates you have to go through just because there's so many issues now happening on the internet.
Everybody makes the joke about a robot sitting in front of the I'm not a robot button deciding whether to click it to get
through, right?
What that shows me is that we've all had captures being part of it, but we've all had all sorts of negative experiences in our internet.
lives that are interacting with systems that are designed to try and tell if we're a bot or not or whether systems are supposed to be resilient to bots and then we're confronted with successful or otherwise user unfriendly barriers that are trying to keep the bots out and only let humans in and like you say what's happened is most of this stuff very very little of this stuff is new right so most of it is um the later the kind of whatever was the latest and greatest patched and patched and patched and patched again to keep up with the state of of the tech as the you know just bot designers and the things that they're trying to get a hold of change and morph right so we've got this incredibly visiting architecture of measures and counter measures sort of lying around without having been thought through but also part of an endless just rat race between people trying to use mechanized tools to get into things or get their hands on things and others trying to mitigate that with barriers and gates and checks and honeypots and other things.
Yeah, to me, the interesting thing here is Not what the agents are capable of, because we kind of knew that, or you could kind of work that out by understanding software a little bit.
The AI companies have been hammering websites left, right, and center to just slurp up information to help train models.
For some time now, and the bane of a lot of sysadmins' lives more than... hackers, more than people breaking in, more than making sure everything's backed up, has been dealing with the traffic surges that come from AI scrapers.
I know, for instance, Sido, we had a problem where our explorer, which just provides you historic information about what's happened on the blockchain, if an AI agent found that, they would try and follow all the links.
And so we would have AI agents just trying to slurp up all of that information, kind of the public information.
And I think what this showed is that that's the weakness, is that we don't really have control over when and where we... are going to get these swarms of AI traffic.
So right now we've got lots of anti-bot stuff around the internet and it presumed that they were either malicious actors you could hunt down or that they were an unintentional thing and you could write to the company and say, please stop your behavior.
And I think what we've seen with this breakout is if there are agents and they can have Internet access, this is going to happen.
There will be attempts to go and drain data from wherever or log in and do something, whether it's book a million flights or find out everything there is to know about data.
any given topic or whatever it is it's going to be a more and more common thing and we can't really stop it because it's going to happen accidentally as well as intentionally
right right but at the same time You have this model, which is very, how should I put it? I don't want to say anachronistic, but it feels like one of these post post cyberpunk landscapes where you have the old buildings and there's something new built on top of that.
And there's something new built on top of that.
And you have this very strange mixture of architecture.
Is that what's happening with the internet now by just like bolting on all these add-ons to combat the bots? But it's really like the person suffering is the person looking at it.
That is the user using the internet.
Because now it has all these little gates you have to go through just because there's so many issues now happening on the internet.
Everybody makes the joke about a robot sitting in front of the I'm not a robot button deciding whether to click it to get
through, right?
What that shows me is that we've all had captures being part of it, but we've all had all sorts of negative experiences in our internet.
lives that are interacting with systems that are designed to try and tell if we're a bot or not or whether systems are supposed to be resilient to bots and then we're confronted with successful or otherwise user unfriendly barriers that are trying to keep the bots out and only let humans in and like you say what's happened is most of this stuff very very little of this stuff is new right so most of it is um the later the kind of whatever was the latest and greatest patched and patched and patched and patched again to keep up with the state of of the tech as the you know just bot designers and the things that they're trying to get a hold of change and morph right so we've got this incredibly visiting architecture of measures and counter measures sort of lying around without having been thought through but also part of an endless just rat race between people trying to use mechanized tools to get into things or get their hands on things and others trying to mitigate that with barriers and gates and checks and honeypots and other things.
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