The Age of the All-Access AI Agent Is Here

Big AI companies courted controversy by scraping wide swaths of the public internet. With the rise of AI agents, the next data grab is far more private. For years, the cost of using "free" services from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other Big Tech firms has been handing over your data. Uploading your life into the cloud and using free tech brings conveniences, but it puts personal information in the hands of giant corporations that will often be looking to monetize it. Now, the next wave of generative AI systems are likely to want more access to your data than ever before. Over the past two years, generative AI tools--such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini--have moved beyond the relatively straightforward, text-only chatbots that the companies initially released.