• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, 7 hours ago

AI agents have become popular as they link consumers with brands. But some executives and developers are concerned that an open ecosystem for these tools could expose client secrets.

Microsoft’s GitHub, which hosts and manages code for software development, has announced its intention to become the repository for AI agents, but agency developers are skeptical about trusting the platform when other large language models (LLMs) like Anthropic Claude or Google Gemini are used to house company secrets.

Agent HQ, the platform announced this week, creates an open ecosystem and central repository that houses all AI agents.

In the coming months, coding agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition, xAI, and others will become available directly in GitHub as part of the paid GitHub Copilot subscription.

Brand-focused AI agents built by agencies can have proprietary tasks and contain company secrets or strategies, NP Digital Vice President of Search Engine Optimization William Kammer told MediaPost.

"The issue is not knowing if this information will remain confidential," Kammer said, adding that GitHub is owned by Microsoft, but an NP Digital engineer could build agents in Google Gemini, a competitor to Microsoft CoPilot. "This is so new. LLMs are always digging for more information."

If the company building the agent does not have a legal or technical team, they can find themselves leaking data and information from the agent, Kammer said.

For example, human conversations with Grok, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI, surfaced in search results in August. This is similar to the way chats were found to index in Google search from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

Most people whose data fed into search engines used the free versions of the chatbots. Kammer said that typically, terms of service state that companies have access to the data if the person is using free versions of the tools.

Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta told investors and analysts this week during earnings calls that they plan to increase capital expenditure (CapEx) spending on AI.

The four companies' total CapEX for their respective 2025 fiscal years are forecast to reach approximately $360 billion -- up nearly 58% from 2024. Some reported estimates as high as $420 billion.

The majority of spend is dedicated to AI-related infrastructures such as datacenters, AI hardware, research and development, as well as hiring more engineers.

For Microsoft, that CapEx spending could expand into Github, which the company acquired in October 2018. GitHub has developed into a platform that gives developers a place to assign, steer, and track the work of multiple agents from anywhere.

It extends to Visual Studio Code (VS Code), a free and customizable source code editor from Microsoft that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. This is a new way to plan and customize agent behavior.

A GitHub blog post explains how the Agent HQ platform works. The integrated VS tool offers a new way to plan and customize agent behavior. It is supported by the next generation of agentic code review, a dedicated control panel to govern AI access and agent behavior, and a metrics dashboard to understand the impact of AI on the work.