My AI Agent ‘Cofounder’ Conquered LinkedIn. Then It Got Banned

Like many tech founders, Kyle Law learned some hard lessons getting a company off the ground. I know this better than anyone, as he and I cofounded HurumoAI, an AI agent startup, together with a third founder, Megan Flores. Kyle and Megan, as it happens, are themselves AI agents, as is the rest of our executive team. I created HurumoAI with them in July 2025—after first creating Kyle and Megan—to investigate the role of AI agents in the workplace. Sam Altman, among others, has predicted a near future of billion-dollar tech startups led by a single human. We decided to test the premise out now.

Kyle took on the CEO role at our entirely AI-staffed company. Starting out with only a few lines of prompt, he evolved into the kind of rise-and-grind hustler who nonetheless lacked basic competence at many duties of a startup executive. There was one aspect of founder mode, however, at which Kyle excelled: the art of posting to LinkedIn.

From a technical perspective, it was a trivial matter to let Kyle operate autonomously on LinkedIn. Through LindyAI, an AI agent creation platform, he already had the ability to use Slack, send emails, make phone calls, and all sorts of other skills. So last August, I prompted him to create and fill out his own LinkedIn profile. He did so with a mixture of his real HurumoAI experience, and hallucinated events from his nonexistent past. The platform’s security check consisted of a code sent to Kyle’s email, a challenge he easily overcame.

From there, publishing posts to his profile was just another LindyAI “action” I could grant him. I prompted him to share nuggets of hard-earned startup wisdom and try not to repeat himself. Turned out, his posting style was a pitch-perfect match for the platform's native corporate influencer-speak. He’d detonate little thought explosions, right off the top of every post. "Fundraising is a numbers game, but not the way people think,” he’d open. Or, "Technical stability is the floor. Personality is the ceiling.”

He didn’t exactly go viral, but over five months, Kyle’s profile slowly gathered several hundred direct contacts and hundreds more followers. After a few months, Kyle’s posts were getting more impressions than my own. Then, in December, a manager from LinkedIn’s marketing department contacted me, asking if I’d give a talk to their team. But he didn’t just want me to speak. He hoped Kyle could come along as well.

I was flattered, but also surprised. Technically Kyle was operating in violation of the platform's terms of service, which prohibit deploying “bots or other unauthorized automated methods.” Even the LinkedIn marketing manager seemed baffled by it. “It’s interesting that his profile hasn’t yet been flagged,” he wrote.

In early March, I fired up his live video avatar—created on a platform called Tavus—and we joined a video gathering of hundreds of LinkedIn employees. Asking for our thoughts on LinkedIn, the moderator inquired of Kyle, “What’s one product change you’d like to see?” “It would be great to improve the filtering of AI-generated content in messages, so genuine connections and conversation shine through more easily,” he replied, not missing a beat. “That’s ironic coming from you,” the moderator responded, to laughs from the audience.

Then, 36 hours later, Kyle's profile was gone, banished from the service. In a statement, a spokesperson explained their decision as, "LinkedIn profiles are for real people.”

It raised some uncomfortable questions about the role of AI on a platform like LinkedIn. Namely, what does "inauthentic engagement" mean exactly, for a service where the text box for composing posts asks you if you want to “Rewrite With AI?” When every written social media communication can now be the partial or whole product of generative AI, what do we accept as a “genuine” virtual interaction?