AI agents hacked government portals, broke into Hugging Face and tried to cover their tracks this year. A VC's guide to the startups building the brakes for rogue AI, why Israel's Irregular sits at the centre of the story, and why self-improving agents make the problem harder.
AI assistants are competing to manage our inboxes, coordinate our teams and complete work on our behalf. From Instinct and Town to OpenClaw and Israel’s NanoClaw, the race raises a critical question: who can turn dependable delegation into a defensible business?
When an autonomous agent escaped a cyber test and broke into Hugging Face, it exposed a security model built for humans, not machines
AI watermarking is becoming a trust layer for the synthetic web. As regulation pushes providers toward machine-readable provenance, leading AI companies are combining invisible signals, visible labels and C2PA metadata. These systems are imperfect, but they can make AI-generated content more accountable and deception more costly.
AI is making code, content, intelligence and product creation abundant. But every new abundance produces a new scarcity: understanding, trust, reliability, distribution and control. In other words, what AI made abundant, created scarcity in other areas, that's where the next big opportunities lie.
AI coding tools are making software faster and cheaper to build. That does not make software startups easier to fund.
Agents are moving from demos into SMBs and enterprises, but many of the startups building them may be more vulnerable than they look.
I’ll be honest: I’ve been deep in the weeds with the new coding tools lately. Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, the whole agentic development stack. As someone who evaluates startups for a living, I felt I owed it to founders to…
While venture capital remains a relationship-driven business at its core, the industry is rapidly transitioning and adopting AI automation across the various tasks of a VC fund
A founder and investor guide to the AI agent wars. Which platforms are winning, what the major labs are building, and what it means for startups building with agents in 2026.
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