According to WIRED, the AI industry is entering a new phase of data collection that raises significant privacy concerns. While major AI companies previously faced controversy for scraping large portions of the public internet to train their models, the emergence of AI agents marks a shift toward accessing far more private information.
The article, titled “The Age of the All-Access AI Agent Is Here,” indicates that as AI agents become more prevalent, these systems will require access to users’ personal data to function effectively. This represents what WIRED characterizes as “the next data grab,” distinguishing it from earlier practices that focused on publicly available internet content.
The piece suggests this transition introduces new privacy implications, as AI agents would need to interact with personal information, accounts, and private digital spaces rather than just publicly accessible web content. According to WIRED, this evolution in AI technology brings with it fresh challenges around data access and user privacy that differ substantially from the controversies surrounding the initial training of large language models on public internet data.