03-05-2025
What Are Digital Defense AI Agents?
We're in the new world of agentic AI, which means that everyone's looking at how to use AI agents to their advantage.
In a certain simplistic sense, that means that companies are looking to use AI agents to sell, while governments are trying to use AI agents to do - whatever they are used to doing. Some consumer advocates argue that individual people who are so often being targeted by businesses and government activities need their own AI agents to defend them.
When Alex 'Sandy' Pentland took the stage at this year's Imagination in Action event, he was talking about specifically this type of thing.
'They're going to try and hack me, do bad things to me,' he said of those ubiquitous agents controlled by business, government or big interest parties. 'They are going to twist my mind around politics, all of those things. And my answer to this is I need an AI agent to defend me. I need something who's on my side who can help me navigate returning things or avoiding scams, or all that whole sort of thing.'
The idea that Pentland describes is that your AI agent addresses all of that other agent activity that's aimed at you, and intervenes on your behalf.
The idea of a personal 'digital defender' in the form of an AI agent is not very widely talked about on the web. Pentland's video is up there, but you don't see much about the specific type of project in research papers, or on corporate sites, or even at Consumer Reports (more on this later).
In a way, it's like having a public defender in court. There's a legal effort against you, so you need your own advocacy to represent you on your side. Although some might call these attorneys 'public pretenders' due to underpayment, short staffing, or other problems, hopefully the AI agent is more effective in a global sense.
It's also sort of like consumer reporting – Pentland mentioned how Consumer Reports has been doing this kind of work for 80 years with polls and other tools.
'This is why we have seat belts in cars,' he said. 'At Consumer Reports, what they do is, they pull all their people, they do tests and things like that to find good products. That's what I want, is, I want somebody who's on my side that way.'
Another sort of similar idea is cybersecurity agents who are created by a company called Twine that are intended to protect people from cyberattacks.
But all that aside, Pentland's idea is still in its infancy.
In fact, one of the most interesting parts of his presentation was when he talked about all of these business people making their way into one room to talk about personal AI defense agents.
'We had C-level representation, the head of AI products for every single major AI producer, show up on one week's notice,' he explained. 'We also had all the payers show up … people (who handle) credit cards, etc. We had all the systems guys show up. Now (you're in a) little room with more C-level people than you've ever seen in your entire life. Very busy people who showed up on one week's notice.'
It's largely liability, he suggested, that brought them to the table
'If they're going to deploy these things, and they're going to be interacting with you, they had better not cheat, they'd better not be biased, or scam you,' he said. 'They have a lot of liability, legal liability, as well as reputational liability. They have to be fair in helping you do things, otherwise they're going to end up in class action courts. That's what they wanted. They wanted someone to build a standard best practice personal agent.'
He mentioned a couple of caveats: the agentic system has to undergo legal testing. Ideally, it should be hosted in academia to show impartiality. While best practices are good, he said, companies and other parties really want a standard, because a standard is bulletproof.
Pentland also talked about a sort of digital populism that's appealing to those who feel like there's strength in numbers.
'You're just you,' he said. 'But if there were a million yous, or 10 million yous, all (of them) trying to get a good deal, avoid scams, fill out that legal form, you could actually have Ais that are competitive with the best results. So that solves the own, your own data problem (pretty well).'
In response to questions, Pentland went over some advice for those who are just starting their careers now. Part of it had to do with solving big questions around how these defense agents will work.
'How do I know what's good for me, and what I want?' he asked, raising some of the essential questions of how an AI agent can target its efforts correctly, according to the user's preference and welfare.
He also brought up questions around how to put agents together, to build toward what he called a 'network effect' that magnifies what a connected system of agents can do.
He also talked about another kind of game theory where it's easy to upset the apple cart with just a small adjustment.
Essentially, Pentland argued, a bad actor can easily throw a system out of balance by being 'just a little edgy,' by making small changes that lead to a domino effect that can be detrimental.
He used the example of a traffic jam, which starts off as just one car in dense traffic changing its behavior. This type of game theory, he asserted, has to be factored into how we create our digital defense agent networks.
With all of this in mind, it's probably a good idea to think about building those digital defense agents. They might not be perfect right away, but they might be the defense that we need against an emerging army of hackers utilizing some of the most potent technologies we've ever seen. The idea also feeds back into the whole debate about open source and closed source models, and when tools should be published for all the world to use. It's imperative to keep a lid on the types of bad actors that could otherwise jeopardize systems. In the cryptocurrency days, we had the notion of a 51% attack, where as soon as somebody held more than half of a given blockchain item, they had full control, with no exceptions.
The solution to our AI liability might be something like this. Look for this type of research to continue.
