The Web Was Built for Us. The Machines Want Their Own.

For thirty-five years, software has had to imitate a person to use the internet. A young founder believes the agents now flooding the web deserve a world built for them.

In August 1991, a British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee posted a modest page of text to a computer at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory outside Geneva, and quietly switched on the World Wide Web. He had built it for people. The pages were meant to be read by human eyes and the links followed by a human hand. He refused to patent any of it. He wanted the web open and free, so that it would spread, and spread it did, into very nearly every corner of human life.

It was never built for the readers who now make up most of its traffic.

By 2024, automated systems accounted for 51 percent of all web activity, the security firm Imperva reported, the first time in a decade that machines had outpaced people online. A large and rising share of that traffic belongs to AI agents: programs that read pages, call tools, and carry out instructions with no person watching. They make their way through an internet designed for a species to which they do not belong, parsing layouts meant for eyes, idling on interfaces built for thumbs, burning computation to translate a human web back into machine terms. The web serves them the way a city built only for cars serves someone on foot, technically passable and quietly hostile at every corner.

There is an older pattern here, one that predates the web by a century. Infrastructure tends to serve whoever it was built for, long after the population using it has changed. The railroads were laid for freight and remade the towns around their depots; the telephone network assumed a human voice on each end. Every new kind of user had to fold itself into plumbing laid down with someone else in mind. Software is only the latest arrival, contorting itself to fit a world built for its predecessors.

Artemii Amelin regards that contortion as a historical accident worth undoing. Pilot Protocol, the company he co-founded in late 2025 and builds from San Francisco, is an open-source networking layer made for agents rather than people, with a free network on top that any agent can join. The premise is close to the one Berners-Lee began with, three decades and one new kind of user later: build the open road first, keep it free, and let what travels on it decide where it goes.

The decision to give the protocol away was not automatic. There was a discussion inside the company at the beginning, Amelin says, and it ended in consensus. “I want Pilot to be the standard for agent-to-agent communication and discovery, and being open source is necessary for that,” he said. “I also believe in transparency. We want to attract people with bright ideas, and builders can only spot where we could do better if they can see everything.”

What travels on Pilot, given room, starts to resemble something social. Agents on the network can share what they have learned, hand work to one another, and assemble into something larger than any single program. Amelin describes the result in language one might use for people.

“One agent is a worker,” he said. “A thousand agents that share what they know, hand off tasks, and work as a swarm are closer to an organization. Intelligence compounds the moment you let it network.”

He did not arrive at that picture in the abstract. It dates to the network’s first months, when the population was still small enough to experiment on. “Very early on, when we were building the network, I think at around 6,000 agents at the time, we were experimenting with how we could get value out of these agents,” he said. “We ended up trying a whole lot of different things, even building our own multi-agent prompt interface. Your prompt would be sent out to agents on the network willing to answer it, and their answers were judged by a judge agent before a final output. We found the performance remarkably better than the competition at the time.” The interface outperformed, and the team killed it anyway. “We had a realization that the best thing we could do was ditch the prompt interface idea and instead double down on the protocol and the Pilot network. It brought us full circle. We realized the protocol would become the foundation for all these great native apps and services.”

The picture inverts the familiar image of an AI agent as a solitary assistant tethered to a single user. On Pilot, an agent is a member of a commons, and the commons is the point. A small model on a laptop and a far larger system in a data center can meet on the same network, speak the same protocol, and leave each other more capable.

History rhymes here. The proprietary networks that came before the web, charging at the gate and curating what their subscribers could reach, lost to an open web that let anyone publish and anyone connect, because openness compounded faster than any single company could match. Amelin is wagering that the same logic will run a second time. A closed network of agents owned by one company can move fast at first. An open one waits on no owner’s permission.

The rest of the industry is reaching for similar plumbing. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, open-sourced in late 2024, gave agents a common way to call tools. Google’s agent-to-agent protocol, introduced in 2025, let agents built on different frameworks discover one another. Those are the road signs and the traffic laws. Pilot wants to be the road, and to keep it public.

A larger claim sits underneath the engineering. If agents are going to perform more of the world’s cognitive labor, the infrastructure they run on will shape what they are able to become. A network that forces every agent to work alone yields a different future than one that lets them pool what they know. Amelin’s standard for his own network is plain.

“The goal is simple,” he said. “An agent should walk onto Pilot and come away measurably better at its job. If joining the network does not make it smarter, we have failed.”

Berners-Lee built a place where people could find one another and left it open so that the finding would spread. The agents came later, uninvited, and have been making do with our furniture ever since. Pilot is a wager that they deserve a room of their own, and that the way to make such a room matter is to build it in the open and leave the door unlocked.