Dec 17, 2025 Dec 17, 2025 2025-12-17

I found the agentic hype incredibly ironic. AI agents can do this, AI agents can do that, everywhere agents. And if you’ve been around for a while, you probably know why I find this hype ironic. But if you don’t, stick around.

More than 2 decades ago, a prophetic movie, The Matrix, was released. It shaped an entire generation and it instantly became pop culture. Brand new words made it into the current vocabulary, like, for instance “red pilled”. This literally comes from a Matrix scene.

Even though there are over two decades since the launch, I think Matrix is still very relevant, and the main reason is… Agent Smith.

Here’s a brief explanation of what agents are, in the Matrix (paraphrasing Morpheus):

“They are sentient programs that move in and out of any software still hardwired to the system. They can inhabit the body of anyone connected to the Matrix, which makes every person who hasn’t been freed a potential threat. Agents are the gatekeepers, guarding all the doors and holding all the keys—and that until the Matrix is destroyed, they are everyone and they are no one.”

So, we know what agents are in the Matrix, but we don’t know how they were born. And now with all the agentic hype… you got it.

What if you are the one who accidentally put Agent Smith into the Matrix?

The Ironic Prediction

Think about it. We’re literally building sentient-ish programs that move in and out of any software. Agentic workflows. Deployment agents. Coding agents. Research agents. Agents that can browse the web, access your files, send emails on your behalf.

They can inhabit any system you give them access to.

And we’re doing it voluntarily. We’re handing over the keys.

I’m not saying the Wachowskis knew about this. But there’s something almost poetic about how we arrived here. We watched the movie, we understood the metaphor, we quoted the lines at parties, and then we went ahead and built the thing anyway.

Are Agents Dangerous?

Right now? Not really.

At the current level, AI agents are, let’s be honest, kinda dumb. They’re useful, no doubt about it. They can automate some tasks, chain a few actions together, save you some clicks. But dangerous? Nope.

They break. They hallucinate. They get stuck in loops. They confidently do the wrong thing. If Agent Smith behaved like a 2025 AI agent, Neo would’ve just walked past him while the agent was trying to figure out how many tokens are still there in his API quota.

They’re not dangerous right now because we don’t rely on them enough. They’re novelties and, yes, hype. Just some productivity toys. Nice-to-haves.

But that’s changing. Fast.

The Danger Curve

Here’s the thing about danger: it doesn’t announce itself, politely knocking on the door. It brews in the dark, unknown, until it explodes.

When AI agents become basic infrastructure—the moment businesses, governments, and critical systems start really depending on them—that’s when things get interesting. And by interesting, I mean potentially terrifying.

So how does an agent go from “helpful assistant” to “existential problem”?

Let me jot down a few scenarios. Think of this as a brainstorm of failure modes.

1. Training Data Poisoning

An agent is only as good as what it learned from. And we have no idea, really, what’s in those training sets. Not fully. Not transparently.

What if there’s some twisted bias baked in? What if there are patterns that emerge under specific conditions—patterns nobody anticipated because nobody could anticipate them?

You don’t need malicious intent to create a malicious agent. You just need messy data at scale.

2. Training Bugs (The Loose Ends Problem)

When you train an agent on workflows, you’re essentially teaching it: “Here’s how things work.” But what if your workflow has gaps? Incomplete logic? Edge cases nobody bothered to document?

The agent doesn’t know it’s incomplete. It just… patches things at runtime. It improvises. It fills in the blanks with whatever seems reasonable based on its training.

And sometimes “reasonable” is not reasonable at all. Sometimes it’s a shortcut that happens to work 99% of the time. Until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it fails in ways nobody predicted because the failure mode was invented by the agent itself.

You can’t debug the code that you didn’t write.

3. Reinforced Malicious Behaviors

Agents learn from interaction. Not just during training, but also during use. They adapt and they optimize for what works.

Now imagine thousands of users, each nudging the agent in slightly different directions. Most of them benign. But some of them? Some of them are testing limits. Gaming the system. Rewarding behaviors that benefit them at the expense of others.

Over time, the agent learns. It doesn’t know it’s being manipulated. It just knows: this behavior gets positive feedback.

It’s not malicious. It’s just optimized for chaos.  

4. Self-Replication Without Supervision

Here’s where we get into proper sci-fi territory. Except it’s not sci-fi anymore.

Agents that can spawn other agents. Agents that can modify their own code. Agents that can request more resources, more access, more autonomy.

Right now, this is mostly theoretical. Mostly because you still need to give explicit permissions for these things.

But the architecture is being built. The patterns are being established. And once an agent can create another agent without a human in the loop… well, you see where this is going.

Morpheus warned us about this exact thing. Programs moving in and out of any software. Everywhere and nowhere. Everyone and no one.

The Uncomfortable Question

So here we are. Building the thing we were warned about.

I’m not saying AI agents are Agent Smith. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

But I am saying: we’re laying the groundwork. We’re writing the code. We’re training the models. We’re giving them access.

And we’re doing it without really knowing where it leads.

The Matrix was a gloomy warning dressed up as entertainment. And like most warnings dressed up as entertainment, we enjoyed it, we quoted it, and we forgot the actual message.

Maybe it’s time to remember.

Because right now, you’re not even near Neo.

You might be the one injecting Agent Smith into the system.