The Two Stories Everyone Tells About AI Agents Are Both Wrong

The AI world tells two stories about agents. Both share the same assumption, and that assumption is wrong. Callable, constrained, orchestrated. A2A gives them protocol cards. MCP gives them function interfaces. LangGraph, Autogen, CrewAI give them schedulers. The agent does what it is told. Useful, safe, and fundamentally limited, because the intelligence lives in whoever wrote the orchestration logic, not in the agents themselves. Story Two: Agents as Risk Agents are autonomous, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous. They might pursue goals we did not intend.