It was a mantra coined by the tech giant Meta and used until 2012, which came to define the bad old days of social media running riot in a feeding activity of user data.
OpenAI's agents seem to feature prominently in the current roll call of AI products taking their remits to extremes.
The Australian government is fuming at the firm's most recent disclosure, that its products accessed both public and non-public data from part of the country's online Medicare healthcare system.
Worse still, the agents were reportedly able to plot the attack using a German web forum they secretly took over in June, according to ABC's Cam Wilson, external.
When the website's editors noticed and started deleting pages, the agents shared code designed to retrieve them.
Australia says it is carrying out an urgent review into whether any laws have been broken, but part of that rests on being able to prove intent – which OpenAI denies.
A popular solution to keeping the tech on the straight and narrow lies in two parts: slowing down the pace of its development, and carrying out international regulation to police it.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham highlighted the need for new global AI standards in his first international speech at the UN General Assembly.
Alarm bells rang loudly when former Anthropic safety researcher Joseph Coxon said he believed the tech had a 10% chance of destroying humanity within the next 10 years.
"There are known risks which are serious enough to be getting on with," Sir Nick Clegg, former head of global affairs at Meta, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.