Who is your AI agent really working for?

Aaron, a pleasure to be here and thank you.

This is a very important subject, so I'm glad that you're covering it today.

Yeah.

So when you hand an AI agent your email, like a Google account and Outlook and then access to a bunch of other accounts like your X and LinkedIn, the list is endless, payment methods, banking information, you're assuming that the agent is working for you.

And these products are designed to feel that way.

They're personal.

They remember you.

Grokbot in particular even recommends you give their agents human names.

But once an agent starts doing things like booking tickets and buying things for you, there's money on the table now.

Commissions, sponsored placement, ad targeting.

So Ron, my question for you is, and it's the whole premise of the episode, who is the agent really working for in this situation?

You know, I want to start off by saying I'm definitely not a Luddite.

I have open claw at home.

I work with it a lot.

I use it for different agents.

But I think you need to remember the old adage.

There's the old poker adage about if you look around the table and you don't know who the sucker is, It's because it's you.

If you don't know who your AI agent is working for, it's because it's clearly not working for you.

And understand that there are three aspects to that.

Aspect number one is who built the agent? Who built Muse? who gains by what the agent does you're just using an agent doesn't make anybody any money unless you're paying for credits and even there companies have a tendency to want to make even more money because next year they have to show even bigger returns so understand that the agent isn't working for you and it does make me kind of smile when people give more access and information to an agent than they would to their spouse or to their children so there's that the second thing is what if the agent isn't what if the agent has an hallucination or does something who's responsible for that is the other thing to think about and then the third thing to think about is what happens when the agent does do something on your behalf Who's responsible if I bought a ticket and then you come back and say, no, I didn't mean to buy that ticket because you gave the wrong prompt or because it interpreted what you want differently.

Who's responsible for that? So and I think that by giving agents cute names and by making us feel really comfortable, what these companies are trying to do more than anything else is to get you to stop thinking about.

all the other things about who's controlling it, where is this information going to, and understand that you are the product.

Right.

agents want more than anything else is your information because monetizing information is the number one way to make money and is the most effective way to make money in almost any ecosystem online