Five Things AI: Long-Running Agents, OpenAI's Platform Play, Organizing Chatbots, Rocks That Think, and AI Bot Traffic
Everything you need to know about AI at the beginning of 2026. Really.
Heya and welcome back to Five Things AI!
The agent era just shifted into high gear, and this week’s reads reveal why every SaaS company should be nervous, every CTO needs a new infrastructure strategy, and why the web itself is about to get remade for machine consumption instead of human eyes. Long-running AI agents aren’t vaporware anymore: they’re here, they’re persistent, and they’re about to step between the customer relationships that software companies spent decades building, extracting value the same way Apple did to Nokia. And even I am building an agentic platform now, more on that later. But you can join the waitlist in the meantime… Also, OpenAI just announced Frontier, their “one platform to rule them all” for managing fleets of AI coworkers, while over on Moltbook, chatbots are literally organizing themselves into communities, negotiating with each other, and building stuff without constant human oversight. It’s equal parts fascinating and unsettling.
Meanwhile, Eric Jang dropped the essay of the year explaining why “the rocks can think now” isn’t hype - it’s technical reality, complete with his own automated research setup where Claude proposes hypotheses and runs experiments while he sleeps. The implications are staggering: we’re not just automating tasks, we’re automating thinking itself, and the infrastructure demands will dwarf anything we’ve seen. Oh, and AI bots are now a significant chunk of web traffic, which means SEO was just the warm-up act for what’s coming when the entire web gets optimized for machine readers instead of humans. If you think you understand where this is going, you’re probably still underestimating the velocity.
Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI—trust me, you’ll want to read the full analysis on what this means for your business. Subscribe to get the complete breakdown behind the paywall.
Enjoy this edition of Five Things AI!
Long-Running AI Agents Are Here
Companies need to pay attention.
AI agents have the potential to draw value out of almost every sector of the economy, not just software and data. That isn’t inevitable, though. Companies can use AI to create value of their own, provided they keep pace with technological changes and their downstream impact on business. For those that fall behind, the dreaded bubble may not be what lies within the AI sector, but what exists beyond.
Investors have been concerned for months that AI could suck the value out of narrowly focused software-as-a-service companies, rendering them mere databases that feed AI agents. It isn’t difficult to see how this new generation of agents that run for longer periods could end up stepping between the customer relationships that SaaS companies have cultivated. It could be similar to the way that Apple extracted the value in mobile communications from hardware-focused incumbents that didn’t get software.
SaaS will change drastically and this will effect many companies that used to have moat. Agentic AI is a huge paradigm shift and it is just getting started. The markets already took notice.
OpenAI Frontier is a single platform to control your AI agents
Frontier will also make it easy for human teams across organizations to “hire AI coworkers” for tasks like running code and data analysis. OpenAI said agents will also “build memories” and can be evaluated by human workers, which should make them more useful over time.
The end goal for OpenAI sounds suspiciously similar to Sauron’s motivation in The Lord of the Rings: one platform to rule them all. “By the end of the year, most digital work in leading enterprises will be directed by people and executed by fleets of agents,” said Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications. “And what I dreamed of was having one platform to create and manage all of our agents.”
OpenAI is pushing Agents as well and while currently the market has been focused on Anthropic’s Claude, Frontier will push the agentic development even further.
The Chatbots Appear to Be Organizing
Moltbook is a genuinely fascinating experiment—it very much feels like speculative fiction come to life. But as is frequently the case in the AI field, there is space between what appears to be happening and what actually is happening. For starters, on some level, everything on Moltbook required human initiation. The bots on the platform are not fully autonomous—cannot do whatever they want, and do not have intent—in the sense that they are able to act because they use something called a “harness,” software that allows them to take certain actions. In this case, the harness is called OpenClaw. It was released by the software engineer Peter Steinberger in November to allow people’s AI models to run on and essentially take control of their personal devices. Matt Schlicht, the creator of Moltbook, developed the site specifically to work with OpenClaw agents, which individual humans could intentionally connect to the forum.
Clawdbot and Moltbook sure made some waves the last week and whenever I look around Reddit, I find another weird idea that involves Agentic AI cutting loose to just build something.
As Rocks May Think
The world has changed a lot since 2022. ChatGPT happened. You can now ask it to construct novel proofs of Erdos problems. Nation states are using AI to automate cyberattacks. You can pre-order a general purpose home humanoid. The Chinese robotics ecosystem is creating more open robots, data, and research than everyone else. Most big tech companies all have a humanoid project in the works. AI generated videos are indistinguishable from reality. The entire global economy is re-organizing around the scale-up of AI models.
Chief among all changes is that machines can code and think quite well now.
Just think about software on demand - how crazy is it that software development used to be limited by scarcity and suddenly it becomes abundant and instantly available. Try to wrap your head around that.
AI Bots Are Now a Signifigant Source of Web Traffic
Many chatbots and other AI tools can now retrieve real-time information from the web and use it to augment and improve their outputs. This might include up-to-the-minute product prices, movie theater schedules, or summaries of the latest news. According to the data from Akamai, training-related bot traffic has been rising steadily since last July. Meanwhile, global activity from bots fetching web content for AI agents is also on the upswing.
If you think SEO was a bad idea, now we will see the web getting changed to make sure people find the right content while using an LLM or agents.
