No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:03:52 · Sarah Guo, Maxim Bar Kogan
[00:03:52] S1: you the same question. I said, is anyone going to do this before you run out of money? [00:03:58] S0: I think there was a good chance that I would've run out of money before because I think you were right. Like, I think there was an element of chance here, but then I think the market did happen. So, we had suddenly reasoning models that could do long horizon tasks. We had Cloud Code, which became like the really first widely used autonomous agent, and then we had Cowork and OpenCLO. And I think we're starting to see now that these types of agents that are very autonomous, even though everyone was afraid to build them, everyone started building these low code platforms that were much more limited, much more based on connectors, those platforms ended up being quite limited, so we didn't get the productivity gains from those limited platforms. But when we started getting the crazy benefits from these very unleashed agents that could do everything, that had much less controls baked into them, and even very large enterprises decided they're going to adopt it. Know, Anthropix revenue is coming from enterprises that are paying for cloud code to do a lot of the work that developers used to do. That was a bit of kind of how we started, and we definitely were in luck that very autonomous agents appeared before it was too late.
00:05:17 · Sarah Guo
[00:05:17] S1: So can you describe a little bit just because it's, I think, both close to impossible and then very useful in this period of AI to think about what is deployment right now and then, you know, what's changing about capability? What's the one liner on what the Onyxx product does today? And then, like, how you think about long term vision?
00:05:36 · Maxim Bar Kogan
[00:05:36] S0: Today, like, Onyxx is really does two things. Number one is we train models and build agents that can oversee other agents. And the goal of that is to say, okay, we need someone to be able to tell that all of these actions that are now happening by these AIs that we're adopting are legitimate because the number of these actions is growing exponentially. And so, things that we thought might be useful in the past, like a human in the loop, now that you're going to have 100x, 1000x, a million x of these actions, that's not going to work. And then we take that capability and we basically productize it in a product that we call the AI control plane or the secure AI control plane, where we come to Enterprise and say, hey, let's find all of your AIs and autonomous agents and hook them up to Onyx to this system where we can oversee what your AIs are doing, so that you don't run into the risk of, as you're exponentially doing more things with AIs, you're going to start having really bad actions happen. And we've seen some of that happen lately with downtimes that were caused by agents doing their own thing, agents accidentally publishing code and tokens that they weren't supposed to, and so on. So, definitely, enterprises are starting to realize that that risk has grown exponentially and that they don't have any way to stop the adoption. So, they just now have to do something to reduce the chance of these agent actions being illegitimate or incorrect.
00:07:11 · Sarah Guo, Maxim Bar Kogan
[00:07:11] S1: Yeah. I think one of the core reasons, obviously, the foundation model labs are going after code is because it is very powerful in general and can do, you know, in theory, all things software can over time. The flip side of that is it can do all things software can. Right? And so I joyously am already in the camp of a, having been over permissive with my agents such that it deleted data permanently and caused rework. So I'm like, [00:07:41] S0: oh, okay. [00:07:42] S1: I think I need some guardian spirits around it. Given your deployments today and talking to large enterprises, what is the state of deployment? Right? Like, much do you see that's within these more scoped, like, studio like platforms versus, you know, free riding coding agents? How much are you actually seeing in large enterprises and in different sectors?
00:08:09 · Maxim Bar Kogan
[00:08:09] S0: Yeah. So, I think right now, in our typical enterprise, we break it down to three categories. So, we break it down to various SaaS platforms that are typically more low code, where people build agents in this drag and drop way, and they're not really autonomous agents. I would think of them more as the automations. Then there are first party agents. People are building in their cloud, potentially because it's an application they want inside the company, or even a product they're planning to release to the customers that is agentic. And then the third category is very autonomous coding agents and assistants. Of these categories, I would say roughly at this point, over 50% is the autonomous coding agents and assistants in the average enterprise. Then probably 45% is those low code automations, and the last 2% are really the first party ones that they're building themselves, because obviously it's much harder to build effective agents, and it's much easier to adopt agents off the shelf or build them with low code. And that's what we're seeing. We do think that the automations are also the fastest growing category. So, it used to be that only developers would see cloud code growing like fire in our customer base, and now we're seeing a cloud co worker growing even faster. We're starting to see, to our own surprise actually, people adopting OpenCloud as a legitimate sanction tool in the company because the CEO is very driven to adopt AI. So, I think that today, autonomous Azure is by far the fastest growing category, today typically comes without any controls.
00:09:58 · Sarah Guo
[00:09:58] S1: So enterprises already buy, let's say, 100,000,000,000 of security today. They have lots of different protections at the endpoint and network and cloud and identity domains. What's relevant here for securing agents, or is none of it? Like, how do you think about the existing protection set?