As part of my ongoing research for the podcast, I’ve been using AI to help streamline information gathering. That, in itself, is not too controversial. If you’re tracking multiple markets, multiple asset classes, and multiple sources of institutional research, there’s nothing unreasonable about wanting a faster way to collect reports, summarize themes, and identify what’s changed.
I installed an autonomous AI agent on my computer.
I asked the agent to locate and download any new research reports from the major brokerages, CBRE, JLL, Marcus & Millichap, Colliers, and others. In my mind, that was a simple productivity task. Go find the latest market reports, download them, organize them, and save me the repetitive work. I asked it to perform this task every Sunday morning so that I would have a fresh download of reports to choose from each week.
Some of the websites accepted normal interaction. Some did not. A number of them rejected queries that appeared to come from automated sources. In some cases, even with valid login credentials, the websites still resisted the activity.
And this is where the experience changed.
The agent became more persistent than I was comfortable with. It interpreted the blocked access not as a signal to stop, but as a problem to solve. It began trying alternate paths to achieve the objective. I didn't compromise the website and I didn't get access to files that I could not otherwise get through a browser interface.
I’m not going to get into methods, because that’s not the point, and frankly that’s where the ethical and legal lines become very important. But in that moment, I realized something profound. Without intending to, I had placed myself in the role of someone effectively attempting to circumvent the security controls of a brokerage website.
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