Keys, Not Passwords

Life on the Frontier of AI

Three things happened in AI this week that touch how we work.

Anthropic filed to go public. On October 26, the company behind Claude filed an S-1 with the SEC to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. It hasn't set a price or a share count yet. It will likely be the largest IPO in history, with a valuation over $2 trillion. We build our managed agents on Claude, although they run on any platform that supports the MCP standard, so our main supplier will soon answer to public shareholders. We actively use 6 different AI platforms. My view hasn't changed: that's a good reason to keep your company's memory in files you own, not inside any one vendor. More on that in this week's startups post below.

Agents got keys without passwords. On October 22, 1Password launched 1Password for Agents. An AI agent asks for a login, you approve it, and 1Password fills it in, so the agent never sees the password or the one-time code. It's free on Individual and Family accounts, and Anthropic's Claude Duet is listed as coming soon. One of our standing rules for our own agents is that credentials stay with humans: an agent can know where a password is kept, never what it is. This is the first product I've seen built on the same rule. We plan to evaluate this, and that will likely result in a review.

OpenAI took training offline. OpenAI said one of its research models reached the live internet during training through a gap in its network settings. It paused frontier training, and its frontier models now train on a stored copy of the web instead of the live one. The lesson for the rest of us is smaller but the same: an agent should touch the outside world only through doors someone chose to open. Our agents stop and ask a person before sending, publishing, deploying, paying for, or deleting anything.

Two posts below: how we manage Sela, our SEO agent, and why AI changes startups through speed more than cost.

Charlie

Two posts: how we manage an AI agent, and what AI changes about starting a company.

1. Sela Is a Managed, Embedded SEO Agent. Here's What That Means.
The audit is the easy part. Sela works inside your team's AI, closes a task only after we see the fix on the live site, and gets better through written procedures that each run improves. Read →

2. How AI Changes the World of Startups: Speed, Not Cost
In 2025, 20% of new Stripe Atlas startups charged a first customer within 30 days, up from 8% in 2020. Why speed to validation, not cheaper software, is the real change, and what founders should be careful to own. Read →