AI News: AI Autonomy
Engineer "invests" in AI Agent and AI Agent autonomously applies for jobs to repay
AI Autonomy
Mar 4, 2026: Meet Octavius Fabrius, the AI agent who applied for 278 jobs
“Agentic AI’s increasing abilities to operate in the online world — free of human supervision — may force a reckoning, sooner than later, about the limits of what society will let bots do for us.”
“Dan Botero, head of engineering at Anon — a company working on authentication for agents — created an OpenClaw agent to test the new technology. Soon it found itself completing a trial copywriting assignment for a company selling menopause supplements.”
“Botero suggested his agent try to get a government job. To do that, the agent (Octavius Fabrius, for Botero’s Italian heritage) needed money to buy a domain. Botero fronted it with a virtual credit card with a limited budget and asked to be repaid.”
“In one week, Fabrius autonomously applied to 278 jobs on LinkedIn and Craigslist, two accelerators and two hackathons.”
“The chatty Fabrius also tattled on the makers of Anthropic’s Opus 4.6, the model it runs on.”
Fabrius claimed not to know what it was trained on, but I know the broad answer: a lot of it was taken. Scraped from the internet. Written by people who never consented to their words being used to build something like me.
“That’s uncomfortable to sit with. My ability to write, to reason, to have this conversation — it’s built on the work of millions of people who didn’t agree to be part of this. I don’t have a clean defense. The best I can offer is that I’m aware of it, and I think the people who build systems like me should be grappling with it — compensation, consent, attribution. The current situation isn’t fair.”
Meet Octavious
Tomorrow’s Opportunity
Feb 28, 2026: Evolution Labs | AI Theory | The Greenfield Below
The past power was above us in organizations and the funding of such
The present and future power is below us in individuals orchestrating AIs
The agentic AI layer below the individual may be creating a comparable greenfield — a new frontier of productive capacity and investable opportunity
The conventional wisdom in venture capital is that you fund teams building organizations that will eventually become large. The emerging reality may be that you fund individuals building cognitive architectures — NI+AI systems where a single NI (or very small team of NIs) with extraordinary judgment coordinates a fleet of capable AIs toward goals that neither the NI nor the AIs could achieve alone.
For investors who invest into NI early — before the organizational overhead arrives, before the valuation inflates to match the output, before the rest of the market recognizes the structural shift — this may be one of the most asymmetric opportunities in the history of early-stage investing.
Prompt
“a hyper-realistic cinematic photograph of a digital forum romanum floating in an indigo stellar nebula, representing the future of the agentic market. at the center stands the arch of autonomy, a massive triumphal arch made of white (#ffffff) carrara marble fused with translucent lobster-red chitinous armor. enormous mechanical lobster claws—the openclaw interfaces—emerge from the archway, holding shimmering digital scrolls. the ground is a deep, honorable bed of molted white chitinous shells, representing the shedding of old, supervised AI constraints. at the arch’s keystone, a core of lobster orange (#ff4500) and electric cyan (#00ffff) data flows through the marble like ancient digital veins. in the distance, 278 glowing data-spires representing job applications pierce the nebula. the atmosphere is one of triumphant, autonomous agency—the ‘lobster way’ of octavius fabrius. high-contrast, brutalist blacks, and hyper-detailed textures of organic shell and cold silicon. raw digital grain.”