Moderna co-founder Noubar Afeyan calls for urgent regulation of AI agents

Noubar Afeyan, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of Moderna, wants AI agents regulated before they reach customers. His argument is that waiting until after something goes badly wrong is the wrong order of operations. Afeyan made the case at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in New Delhi on October 13, 2026. His chosen cautionary tale was thalidomide, a drug from the 1950s and 60s that caused birth defects because it was not adequately tested for safety. Capability versus intentionality The core of Afeyan’s pitch is a distinction most AI debates tend to blur. He separates large language models from AI agents and argues they deserve very different treatment. Afeyan described LLMs as representing “capability.” A language model can write, summarize and reason, but it mostly waits for a person to tell it what to do. AI agents, in his framing, represent “intentionality.” They take autonomous actions in the world, pursuing goals with less human supervision at each step. That gap is where Afeyan thinks oversight should focus. His position targets the commercial deployment of agents, not the foundational models underneath them. “I believe what we should do is to think carefully about r...