AI's control problem: agents, costs and robots

AI is moving from answering questions to taking action, and the bills are arriving faster than anyone budgeted for. An agent that spins up thousands of other agents can turn a $20 task into a $50,000 one, and companies are starting to scale into bankruptcy. The fight now isn't over how smart these systems are. It's over who controls what they do and what they cost. Deirdre Bosa talks with three executives at the center of that shift: » Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, on rogue agents, guardrails and why autonomous systems need a kill switch. » Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, on inference economics and whether efficiency can keep AI businesses solvent. » Evan Beard, co-founder and CEO of Standard Bots, on the U.S.-China robot gap — 300,000 deployed to our 30,000 — and what it costs to lose the next platform.