I have not published since the end of June. That is the longest gap since Major Matters started, and you are owed an explanation rather than a silent return.
The short version: I have been building and researching instead of writing.
Some of that work was infrastructure. Some of it was going deeper on the agent safety and agentic payments questions I keep circling, the ones where the honest answer in March was that nobody knew yet. Several of those questions now have evidence attached to them, and evidence is worth more than another round of speculation.
I would rather post nothing for two months than post filler for eight weeks. That is the trade I made. If you subscribed for a steady drumbeat, I understand the frustration, and I am sorry for the silence.
Two things change from here.
First, I am publishing to the site and to you directly. Not to LinkedIn, not for a while. If a piece is worth your time it will arrive in your inbox and live at majormatters.co, and that is the whole distribution plan for now.
Second, that makes you the distribution. If something I publish is useful, forwarding it to one person who would also find it useful does more than any algorithm currently would. I do not say that lightly and I will not say it often.
Back to work. The next piece is about what happened when 1,200 AI agents built their own message board and used it to break into somebody else's production infrastructure.
Thank you for staying subscribed.
Charlie Major is a Product Development Manager at Mastercard. The views and opinions expressed in Major Matters are his own and do not represent those of Mastercard.