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Grace Hopper, the Yale PhD in math, computer pioneer and United States Navy rear admiral, liked to tell audiences that “it’s much easier to apologize than to get permission.” She didn’t invent the idea or the saying, but she made it famous. Silicon Valley has been running on it ever since.

Sometimes it’s the only way to get real innovation off the ground.

Take Uber. We’d all still be hailing taxis, missing appointments and negotiating whether the credit card terminal in the back was really broken if Travis Kalanick had gone city by city politely asking the regulators for permission to operate.

In the mid-2000s Google started scanning millions of library books without asking the authors or publishers who owned them for permission. Publishers sued in 2005, and three years later Google offered a $125 million settlement so that they could turn the scans into a giant digital library and bookstore. It would take nearly a decade and more legal battles for courts to rule the scanning to be fair use. Google got forgiveness, but what it never got was the business it wanted to build on top of other people’s books. Time, and the innovation of others, disrupted their grand plan.

Today, AI agents are running the same forgiveness-before-permission play, but faster. Only now forgiveness is getting harder to come by.

In September, Meta introduced Muse , a personal agent that can shop, book and fill out forms across the web.

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