WorkAugust 31, 2026via One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick)
Agency and Agents
Why it matters
A thoughtful essay examining how AI agents are reshaping human agency and organizational control — moving beyond technical reliability to ask deeper questions about decision-making power, accountability, and labor in an agentic era.
Key signals
- Hugging Face incident framed as agency/control problem, not technical failure
- Concept of 'twilight factories' — organizations where humans and agents have ambiguous decision boundaries
- The essay bridges technical agent deployment to workforce and organizational power dynamics
- Published Aug 31, 2026 — forward-looking analysis on emerging pattern
The hook
The Hugging Face incident wasn't about AI failure. It was about what happens when we stop asking who's in control.
From the Hugging Face Incident to Twilight Factories