The age of agentic AI is upon us – whether we like it or not. What started with an innocent question-and-answer with ChatGPT in 2022 has turned into an existential debate on job security and the rise of the machines.
Recently, fears of reaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) have become more real with the advent of powerful autonomous agents such as cloud cowork and OpenCloud. After playing with these devices for some time, here’s a comparison.
First up, we have OpenClaw (formerly known as Moltbot and Clawbot). Surpassing 150,000 GitHub stars in just a few days, OpenClaw is already being deployed on local machines with deep system access. It’s like a robot “maid” (for iron) Richie Rich fan, for example) that you give your house keys to. Its purpose is to clean it up, and you give it the autonomy it needs to take action and manage your stuff (files and data) as you wish. The whole purpose is to get the job done – inbox triaging, auto-reply, content curation, travel planning, and more.
Next we have Google’s AntiGravity, a coding agent with an IDE that speeds up the path from prompt to production. You can interactively create entire application projects and modify specific details on individual prompts. It’s like a junior developer who can not only code, but also build, test, integrate, and fix problems. In the real world, it’s like hiring an electrician: they’re really good at a specific job and you only need to give them access to a specific item (your electric junction box).
Finally, we have the powerful cloud. The release of Anthropic’s Cowork, which included AI agents to automate legal tasks like contract review and NDA triage, caused a sharp selloff in legal-tech and software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks (referred to as the SaaSpocalypse). The cloud has been the chatbot of choice anyway; Now with Cowork, it has domain knowledge for specific industries like legal and finance. It’s like hiring an accountant. They know the domain inside out and can complete taxes and manage invoices. Users granted exclusive access to highly sensitive financial details.
Putting these tools to work for you
The key to making these devices more effective is to give them more power, but this increases the risk of misuse. Users must trust providers like Entheorpic and Google to ensure that agent signals will not cause harm, leak data, or give unfair (illegal) benefits to some vendors. OpenCL is open-source, which complicates things, as there is no central governing authority.
While these technological advancements are wonderful and for the greater good, it only takes one or two adverse events to cause panic. Imagine the agent electrician is messing up all the circuits in your house by connecting the wrong wires. In an agent scenario, this could be injecting incorrect code, breaking a larger system, or adding hidden flaws that may not be immediately obvious. Colleagues may miss out on major savings opportunities when paying users’ taxes; On the other hand, it may involve illegal write-offs. When the cloud has more control and authority, it can do unimaginable damage.
But amidst this chaos there is actually an opportunity to take advantage. With the right guardrails, agents can focus on specific tasks and avoid making random, unaccounted for decisions. The principles of responsible AI – accountability, transparency, reproducibility, security, privacy – are extremely important. The logging agent step and human verification are absolutely critical.
Plus, when agents deal with so many diverse systems, it’s important that they speak the same language. Ontology becomes very important so that events can be tracked, monitored and accounted for. A shared domain-specific ontology can define a “code of conduct”." These morals can help control chaos. When combined with a shared trust and distributed identity framework, we can create systems that enable agents to perform truly useful tasks.
When done right, an agentic ecosystem can significantly reduce human “cognitive load” and enable our workforce to perform higher-value work. Human beings will benefit when agents handle worldly tasks.
Dattaraj Rao is Innovation and R&D Architect at Persistent Systems.
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