Agentic AI Could Improve Everything or Cascade Into Doom

After days of chaos, hundreds of deaths and trillions of dollars wiped off stock markets, the Great Agentic Cascade of July 2028 turned out to have begun much like the great internet outages of October and November 2025: with a minor bug at a major provider on which many of the world’s biggest internet services depended to manage their traffic. But in the intervening three years, the world had gone all-in on agentic AI — systems that can make and carry out decisions without human intervention. Many internet companies had created AI agents that automatically spun up servers at alternative cloud firms when their main service went down. That was their, and the world’s, undoing.

AI agents at the other cloud firms interpreted the deluge of incoming requests as a possible cyberattack. They locked out new customers and throttled traffic for existing ones. Companies with on-premises servers switched over to them, but the resulting spike in electricity demand triggered the AI agents at power utilities to impose rolling blackouts. Digital gridlock became physical gridlock as millions of cloud-connected autonomous vehicles pulled over, leaving ambulances and fire trucks stuck in the snarl-ups.