Enabling Agents and Battling Bots on an AI-Centric Web
4 July 2025 - 26 minsTaken from the AI + a16z podcast, Arcjet CEO David Mytton sits down with a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the increasing complexity of managing who can access websites, and other web apps, and what they can do there. A primary challenge is determining whether automated traffic is coming from bad actors and troublesome bots, or perhaps AI agents trying to buy a product on behalf of a real customer.Joel and David dive into the challenge of analyzing every request without adding latency, and how faster inference at the edge opens up new possibilities for fraud prevention, content filtering, and even ad tech.Topics include:
Why traditional threat analysis won’t work for the AI-powered w...
Series Episodes
Ben Horowitz on AI Infrastructure, Economics and The New Laws of Software
Recorded live at the a16z Fintech Connect conference in Deer Valley, Alex Rampell speaks with Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner at a16z, about how AI has rewritten the fundamental rules of software competition, why crypto infrastructure will become essential in an AI-dominated world, and what the future holds for venture capital.
29 mins
14 April Finished
Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect
Katherine Boyle and Sarah Wang speak with Jesse Genet, a startup founder and family builder, about building 11 AI agents while homeschooling four young children. Jesse runs agents across roles ranging from coding to curriculum planning to household management, and she shares how agent architecture, logging systems, and “benevolent neglect” parenting have changed her life as both a founder and a mother.
54 mins
13 April Finished
What Running Windows at Microsoft Taught Steven Sinofsky About Apple
Theo Jaffee speaks with Steven Sinofsky, board partner at a16z and former president of the Windows division at Microsoft, about Apple's 50th anniversary, the cultural differences that separated Apple and Microsoft, why the MacBook Neo puts Windows laptops in a difficult position, and what the history of computing design reveals about where hardware and software are headed.
31 mins
10 April Finished
Who Controls AI Acceleration? Vitalik Buterin and Guillaume Verdon Debate
Eddy Lazzarin speaks with Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, and Guillaume Verdon, founder and CEO of Extropic, about whether AI progress can or should be steered, the risks of concentrated power, and what open source and decentralization mean for who benefits from increasingly powerful systems. This episode originally aired on the a16z crypto podcast.
1 hour 39 mins
9 April Finished
The Agent Era: Building Software Beyond Chat with Box CEO Aaron Levie
Erik Torenberg, Steve Sinofsky, and Martin Casado speak to Aaron Levie, CEO at Box, about what happens to enterprise software when agents become the primary users. They discuss why coding agents succeed where other knowledge work agents struggle, what abstraction layers mean for the workforce, and how data access and systems of record must change in an agent-first world.
59 mins
8 April Finished
Balaji on Why AI Raises the Cost of Verification
a16z general partner Erik Torenberg speaks with Balaji Srinivasan, angel investor and entrepreneur, about why AI simultaneously reduces the cost of creation and increases the cost of verification, and what that tension means for the shape of the AI economy. They discuss why AI drives companies toward the "trusted tribe" model of the Chinese internet, why physical world tasks are easier to automate than digital ones, why shortcuts only work for experts, and why AI makes everyone a CEO rather than making CEOs obsolete.
1 hour 7 mins
7 April Finished
