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A new AI industry group that includes startups like Anthropic and established players like Intuit aims to educate lawmakers about one of the AI world’s buzziest topics: agents.
Despite 2025 earning the nickname “the year of AI agents,” members of the newly formed Agentic Futures Initiative believe lawmakers and policy officials need to better understand the technology to ensure new products remain interoperable across platforms, secure, and private. How that plays out will have major ramifications for how open the ecosystem is to competitors and upstarts.
“We just saw it as a massive void,” Ryan Dattilo, partner of Aquia Group, the lobbying firm organizing the effort, told Semafor. “We need to bring everyone together in a more organized fashion.”
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Agentic AI essentially describes AI that can take autonomous action on a user’s behalf, but it’s often not so simple. In order for an AI agent to work, it needs to interface with different software. For instance, a simple task like booking an airline ticket could mean navigating a web browser and accessing multiple APIs. All of those interconnections create security and privacy vulnerabilities. And they also create opportunities for companies to erect anticompetitive “walled gardens,” such as app stores and operating systems that can lock in users and keep out competitors.
Matt Boulos, head of policy and safety for Imbue, a founding member of the organization, hopes to see agentic AI develop common protocols, much like the early web, that enable anyone — from tiny startups to massive tech companies — to innovate and add value to the ecosystem.