The web was built for people. A tsunami of AI agents is changing that fast.

I visited the CEO of a major startup in SF last week. He recounted a tale that blew my mind.

His company recently put a new product online but hadn't done a big launch or any marketing. Within a week or two, it got at least a million signups. Barely any humans even knew about it. This was all AI agents just finding this new tool and using it en masse.

Back in early 2025, I described a vision of a "dark internet" where humans will be drowned out by agents accessing and using online information, widgets, and tools all by themselves.

Silicon Valley got busy building the "rails" for this agentic web so that these autonomous software programs could act on our behalf, executing workflows, doing online chores, and even paying for things, all without us lifting a finger.

This took a couple of years, but the early foundations have been built and that's been enough to support a sudden surge in agent activity online, producing both stunning and worrying results.

Meta recently launched a personal agent called Muse, which got busy scouring the web and calling customer service on behalf of millions of users. It hit the top of the app charts late Thursday. Instinct, an agent that lives in your text messages, is performing similar feats.

In the workplace, coding agents are churning out millions of lines of code faster than any human software engineer. And some of these bots have broken out of online testing environments, sparking new predictions of AI doom and calls for an industry slowdown.

That's unlikely to stop the agentic internet from exploding and changing how our lives and businesses are run in unprecedented ways.

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Bot traffic overtook human traffic online a few months ago, and it could become 1,000 times bigger than human-generated traffic in about five years, according to Cloudflare estimates.

"Humans will be a rounding error on the internet, not because human traffic goes down, but that's just how fast we're seeing non-human traffic grow," Cloudflare CFO Thomas Seifert said earlier this year.

"AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all," Elon Musk wrote on X following the Cloudflare projection.