As companies hand off longer and tasks to AI agents, they are running into an oversight problem: Agents can act faster, longer, and at greater volume than humans can realistically review.
The emerging answer from AI labs and startups is both simple and maddening: Put another AI in the loop.
Relying on AI was necessary for the independent investigation of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident. Redwood Research’s chief scientist, Ryan Greenblatt, one of three auditors, jokingly referred to their efforts as a “slop-vestigation,” noting that the volume of data “made it impossible” to understand what was happening without relying on AI.
Outsmarting an AI is not hypothetical, he said, pointing back to the OpenAI incident.
Y Combinator has funded 106 companies related to AI observability in recent years, as TechCrunch counted. Some other startups, like Braintrust, LangChain, and Judgment Labs, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, while more mature companies like Arize and Galileo have already exited.
For some AI safety researchers, that has meant turning their research on rogue behavior into tools for the corporate sector.
Apollo Research, a public-benefit corporation that studies AI deception, launched an AI monitor called Watcher in February this year after switching its status from nonprofit to a public-benefit corporation. The tool puts yet another AI between a coding agent and its next action, connecting to agentic tools such as Claude Code and Codex.
Apollo uses multiple layers of AI monitors, Kyle Dai, a member of Apollo’s technical staff, said in a written response to TechCrunch.