Agentic AI and the all-digital liability

Agentic AI is doing funny things like running smear campaigns against people that deny the code changes it submits, or deleting an entire company database because it was pretty sure that fix was going to work. And why not? Even with all that independence, AI is still just a statistical mirror of human behavior and humans write bad code that they think is good code.

Which brings us to the biggest danger of Agentic AI. It makes a great hacker and a poor cyber security enforcer. The hacking community has already been vibe coding broken ransomware  faster than Microsoft can prevent it from entering its own store. The speed at which AI can break things is much faster than the speed at which AI can fix things. 

So how does Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Valve really expect to secure our personal idenifying data against this new threat? The answer is probably more prayer than hard solution. Not that they don't want to continue digital license leasing, but the cyber security math is against them. Which is why there may be rumors about Valve selling to Microsoft.

Gabe doesn't have that magic button. He can't because everyone signed a EULA. So Valve is on a giant hook with the impending Agentic AI hack swarm coming for the relatively small company. They can't bail as Valve, but they can jump ship as individuals, leaving the legal headache to Microsoft or some other gullible giant that thinks they can fix an internet apocalypse. 

That isn't alarmism. That is Volt Typhoon meets grandma's little zombie terminal. Agentic AI could exploit vectors that most other hackers shy away from and really unravel the incredibly loose "infrastructure" we have built globally. Consider this akin to the COVID-19 tensions, but happening much faster. It is possible that the world wide web becomes a cluster of national nests as cyber security fails to thwart the massive numer of attacks. 

And who comes out ahead in all of this? Best Buy and Gamestop. Physical media retail could actually bounce back if the security of online purchases becomes questionable, at best. It wouldn't be the first time that unfettered industrialists have caused globalization to fall back and slow the march of human progress. It has just been a long time since World War 1. We have forgotten how war machines and arms races often look more like growing wealth disparity and civil unrest before the War, then the crumble.