Epistemic status: I consider the following future quite plausible in the next few years (~35% chance that something vaguely like this occurs), perhaps as soon as a year from now. Imagine an open-source LLM agent good enough to cover its own compute costs and turn a modest profit on average when allowed to run with full internet and tool access and told to make as much money as possible. I estimate this to be slightly better than the best publicly available closed-source models today, with long-horizon reliability and goal-setting being the only thing missing. If the returns generated by such an agent beat the market (plus a margin for any additional risk), there suddenly becomes a strong incentive to spin up huge numbers of them. The internet would be flooded by the by-products of their moneymaking schemes. And returns might be larger for agents without legal or ethical guardrails- cue a deluge of scams and ransomware attacks. Even if profits are very small, anyone with an agenda that the agents can help with is still incentivised to use them. Nation states and terrorist groups now have a golden plausibly-deniable disinformation, mischief, and hacking tool: spin up some agents, tell [...] ---
First published:
August 9th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n8B2bxYhkjhjzyrgh/the-agentic-clusterfuck
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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