It went largely under the radar last week, but Google and Vercel just published competing versions of our AI agent future—and both came out within 24 hours of Anthropic admitting an agentic orchestration platform was used to make Claude into a super-hacker.
TLDR nobody can agree on what AI agents are for, and meanwhile they clearly are powerful because bad guys are using them to attack high value targets yesterday.
My goal with this post is simple: cut through the BS and get you an actionable summary on where we stand on AI agents, why they matter even more these days, and what you can actually build now in the AI agent department.
That means cutting through more than 60 pages of documentation across three different papers to get to the real story.
You’ll get:
Why we need Google’s vision for the agentic future now, post Claude Code-hack
Why Google is also wrong about AI agents in ways we need to build usefully now
What Vercel is seeing that we aren’t publishing or talking about enough
Which companies are building AI agents that reduce toil (not just automate)
Why it matters to build AI agents that get your best people CLOSER to the work
How to target and prioritize workflows that are AI agent-susceptible
How Google is thinking about agents and the evolving challenges of security
Hours back—the Google doc alone is over 50 pages!
Plus, of course a custom prompt to help figure out AI agent opportunities for you. I’ve written the prompt so it gives you three different angles of conversation: 1) a chance to explore smart opportunities for AI agents at work, 2) a chance to identify your best hands-on contribution in an era of agents, and 3) an opportunity to think about how to design the correct security stance for agents at work.
Sounds like a lot, but this prompt is powered up with the whole article as context, so it can take you any direction you want to go!
With that, let’s figure out the real story on one of the biggest agent battles out there right now…
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