Aaron Levie

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, published "Building for trillions of agents" on 7 March 2026, an essay arguing that AI agents have become the primary users of software. His observation is dated: since late 2025, agents have had their own sandboxed compute environments, can write and execute code, interact with APIs and CLIs, and manage their own files and long-term memory. That architecture, first defined by coding agents (Claude Code, Devin, Codex, Cursor, Replit), spread to knowledge work through Claude Cowork, Perplexity Computer, Manus and OpenClaw, the last running 24/7 in a persistent environment.

Levie's numbers are specific: 100 to 1,000 times more agents than people inside a company, trillions worldwide. He rewrites Paul Graham's "Make something people want" into "Make something agents want", and draws a blunt consequence: without an API, a feature does not exist for an agent. CLIs and MCP servers become mandatory. He cites Jared Friedman of YC, who calls tools that block API signup "dead for agents". Seat-based pricing fails when an agent compresses hours of human work into a few lines of text.

A second thread runs through his appearances: Levie's line "Silicon Valley is currently a real Petri dish", quoted by the New York Times, framed Florian Dèbes's 22 April 2026 Les Echos report on agents working as colleagues. He supplies the vocabulary others then use to describe the shift, including Box's own place in the agent infrastructure stack he maps.