Nurturing agentic AI beyond the toddler stage

MIT Technology Review 

The promise of autonomous agentic AI requires significant changes in the governance landscape. Parents of young children face a lot of fears about developmental milestones, from infancy through adulthood. The number of months it takes a baby to learn to talk or walk is often used as a benchmark for wellness, or an indicator of additional tests needed to properly diagnose a potential health condition. A parent rejoices over the child's first steps and then realizes how much has changed when the child can quickly walk outside, instead of slowly crawling in a safe area inside. Suddenly safety, including childproofing, takes a completely different lens and approach. Generative AI hit toddlerhood between December 2025 and January 2026 with the introduction of no code tools from multiple vendors and the debut of OpenClaw, an open source personal agent posted on GitHub.