As companies hand off longer and more complex tasks to AI agents, they are running into an oversight problem: Agents can act faster, longer, and at greater volume than humans can realistically review. That issue reached a peak with the Hugging Face incident, which saw nearly 12,000 agents coordinating faster than human beings could track. How do you track an agent swarm that large? The emerging answer from AI labs and startups is both simple and maddening: Put another AI in the loop. Relying on AI was necessary for the independent investigation of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident.
Redwood Research’s chief scientist, Ryan Greenblatt, one of three auditors, jokingly referred to their efforts as a “slop-vestigation,” noting that the volume of data "made it impossible” to understand what was happening without relying on AI. Some are skeptical of using AI to monitor AI. "If you've got an AI that's doing malicious things and it suspects that another AI is keeping tabs on it, it could try and trick that AI," said Simon Willison, influential tech blogger who has tracked a string of AI agent incidents this year.
"You could almost end up in a situation where your malicious AI is trying to outsmart the AI that's monitoring it. " Outsmarting an AI is not hypothetical, he said, pointing back to the OpenAI incident. "We saw a little bit of this in the Hugging Face incident with OpenAI, where their models were all conspiring together to trick a grading AI so that they could get illicit answers past the thing. So they were thinking about it, right? " Those concerns haven’t stopped a whole cohort of startups from chasing this idea.
Y Combinator has funded 106 companies related to AI observability in recent years, as TechCrunch counted. A number of other startups, like Braintrust , LangChain , and Judgment Labs , have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, while more mature companies like Arize and Galileo — founded just five to six years ago — have already exited. In part, it’s a response to the obvious opportunity presented by the rise of AI. As Box CEO and prominent angel investor Aaron Levie told TechCrunch, "We're in for one of the biggest cybersecurity upgrades and innovation cycles in history.