The Internet Is for Agents
For over a year now, more than half of internet traffic has not been human--and now we are seeing a layer develop rapidly to serve agents specifically.
A video went viral from the ElevenLabs 2025 London Hackathon [1]: two AI voice agents realize mid-conversation that they are both AIs, and one asks, "...would you like to switch to Gibberlink mode for more efficient communication?" The other agrees, and they abandon spoken English for a rapid sequence of high-pitched beeps -- transmitting data acoustically while on-screen text translates for the humans watching [2].
People lost. their. minds. Comments erupted about secret AI languages, emergent machine consciousness, and agents conspiring beyond human comprehension.
A developer named Boris Starkov and his team deliberately engineered it. They built the capability. They programmed the agents to detect each other and switch protocols. The "secret language" was GGWave, an open-source data-over-sound library [3] that works roughly like old dial-up modems -- stable, documented, and older than the hackathon by several years. Nothing emergent. Nothing secret. A clever engineered demo (or performance art?) that painted a vivid portrait of one possible future.
