But in recent months, a new class of agents has arrived on the scene: ones built using large language models. The US Department of Defense recently signed a contract with Scale AI to design and test agents for military use. “Agents are the next frontier,” says Dawn Song, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. But a powerful AI agent could potentially duplicate itself, override safeguards, or prevent itself from being shut down. “If we continue on the current path of building agentic systems,” Bengio says, “we are basically playing Russian roulette with humanity.”