Opinion | AI, Get Thee to an IPO!

Sept. 18, 2026 4:26 pm ET

An insoluble puzzle may be how to give artificial intelligence agents complicated open-ended tasks—tasks that may have many unpredictable paths to a solution—without courting outcomes very much contrary to the intentions of the task giver.

Before testing the first atom bomb, the Los Alamos crew asked Hans Bethe to confirm with math that it wouldn’t start a chain reaction and consume the atmosphere. The AI problem might be as simple as correcting a faulty training strategy. Developers have focused on making AIs that respond to “reward” signals, not perhaps fully accounting for the ways a computerized agent might originate strategies in pursuit of a reward that corrupt or undermine the underlying goal.

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Appeared in the September 19, 2026, print edition as 'AI, Get Thee to an IPO!'.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. He writes the twice-weekly “Business World” column that appears on the paper's op-ed page on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Mr. Jenkins joined the Journal in May 1992 as a writer for the editorial page in New York. In February 1994, he moved to Hong Kong as editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal's editorial page. He returned to the domestic Journal in December 1995 as a member of the paper's editorial board and was based in San Francisco. Mr. Jenkins won a 1997 Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and financial coverage.

Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Jenkins received a bachelor's degree from Hobart and William Smith Colleges and a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. He was a 1991 journalism fellow at the University of Michigan.