The Bad Guys Were Called Agents

In every spy movie I grew up on, the bad guys were called **agents.** Now we are deploying agents into our inboxes, our codebases, our financial accounts, our medical records — and calling it progress.The language is not a coincidence. An agent is something you DEPLOY on behalf of an interest that may or may not be yours. The original meaning is intact. We just stopped noticing because the marketing got louder than the etymology. **When you give an AI agent your credentials, you are doing exactly what the old movies warned you about — handing keys to a third party whose loyalties you cannot audit.**This isn't a doom take. Agents are powerful. But the trust model deserves the same skepticism we would apply to any other agent we hired — what are their incentives, who controls them, and how do we know when they have stopped acting on our behalf?