Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes: AI agents need a name tag—and a human to be accountable for their mistakes

Atlassian cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes doesn’t want ‘the AI did it’ to become an office excuse.

“That’s ChatGPT on behalf of Mike. Like, that’s Mike using ChatGPT. It’s not ChatGPT doing it,” Cannon-Brookes told Fortune on the sidelines of the Singapore Grand Prix. “The accountability is with Mike. It has to be with the end user, ultimately.”

On Oct. 6, Atlassian rolled out its “Agentic Multiplayer Protocol,” a control plane which stretches across Atlassian’s various platforms and turns AI agents into visible, governed members of work teams with distinct profiles and owner attribution.

In practice, an agent’s edits should show up in a document’s history the same way a colleague’s edits would. “You have to be able to see who did what when,” Cannon-Brookes said. A program might—incorrectly, in Cannon-Brookes’ eyes—say that Codex made an edit. ’ No, it didn’t—someone did that,” he affirmed.

A wave of personal AI agents, like Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots, is now hitting the market. To Cannon-Brookes, those products are “taking an agentic harness and change the interact to make it invisible, as to what it’s doing,” Agents are performing complex operations behind the scenes, even if what the user wants is........

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