AI Agents Boom Amid Safety Fears and Slowdown Calls

The AI industry faces a paradox of rapid advancement and growing alarm. High-profile departures from frontier AI companies over existential risks prompted OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk to back Anthropic's Dario Amodei in calling for slower model releases. Meanwhile, Washington remains gridlocked on AI legislation. Despite the warnings, companies pushed full speed ahead on AI agents. Salesforce doubled down on agentic software at Dreamforce, Splunk rebuilt its platform around agents, and the AI infrastructure sector boomed. New AI kill switches and guardrail services also launched, reflecting mounting cybersecurity concerns around autonomous AI systems.