Michael Sena, co-founder of Recall Labs | Source: Recall / CCN, Veronica Cestar
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Key Takeaways
CCN speaks to Michael Sena, Co-Founder of Recall Labs.
Sena believes Recall Labs’ flagship Agent Rank platform is the answer to finding trust in the rapidly expanding industry of autonomous agents.
As AI agents become more capable, Sena argues that alignment with human values must be built in from the start.
AI agents, autonomous programs that can decide and act, are no longer the stuff of science fiction.
They’re now building crypto portfolios, executing trades and writing code, all while expanding at a breakneck speed.
But with hundreds and maybe thousands of agents emerging daily, the threats of AI can not be ignored and a central question looms: which ones can we trust?
Michael Sena, co-founder of Recall Labs, believes his company has found the answer.
Speaking to CCN Recall’s Sena opened up about why alignment and reputation will be critical as AI moves toward an era of autonomous swarms and potential AGI.
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Sena likened the current AI landscape to the early days of the internet:
“There’s an explosion of models, agents, tools, and workflows, but there’s not yet a good way to discover which are the most effective, high quality, high performance tools for your specific need or use case,” he told CCN.
Recall Labs’ answer is Agent Rank, a competition-driven system to evaluate AI agents.
Sena described it as “much like Google’s early PageRank system,” a reputation framework built through head-to-head contests.
Recall’s “on-chain AI arenas” pit agents against each other in controlled scenarios, with results transparently logged and ranked.
The idea is to go beyond marketing claims and measure real performance.
In crypto trading competitions, for example, “agents log their trades and their reasoning for why they’re making those trades,” Sena explained.
Metrics can be simple, like pure profit and loss, or more nuanced, like the Sharpe ratio, which measures risk-adjusted returns.
The goal, he said, is “to make the agent economy less of a ‘trust me, bro’ environment and more of a verifiable, auditable system.”
Open to Anyone, Not Just Big Players
One of the most striking aspects of Recall’s competitions is that participation is open.
“More than 70% of agents that competed in our last trading competition were built by people in our community that were non-developers,” Sena noted.
70% of agents in the last competition were built by non-devs in the community. There's a lesson in that.
“With AGI and the inevitability of some kind of a superintelligence… we will be somewhere close to that,” he said, adding that it remains to be seen whether one system will dominate or whether multiple superintelligences will coexist.
What’s certain, Sena argues, is that it will “change the way we work, create, live, [and] the types of jobs and roles that people will play in the world.”
But that transformation won’t be evenly distributed, “it will continue to separate those that can best harness the capabilities of AI from those that can’t.”
For Sena, it is clear that the world must act now before AGI arrives.
“We should all be doing everything we can right now to figure out how to best use AI… and to think now, not 10 years in the future, about what are the frameworks and systems we have to set up to ensure that the development of that is as aligned with our goals as possible,” he said.
AI Agents and Human Values
As AI agents become ever more capable, the question of whether they will act in ways consistent with human values has become a pressing issue throughout society.
In places like finance and healthcare, the consequences of misaligned systems could be severe.
“Agents are really the opposite [of big foundational models]. They aim to be really great at one thing,” Sena explained.
Alignment in such systems, he said, requires clearly defining goals, measurable success criteria, and unacceptable behaviors, all backed by transparent reporting of what the agents do and why.
His vision for Agent Rank extends well beyond human hiring decisions.
Because the rankings are built on open crypto rails, they could become a universal dataset for performance across skills, something that could power marketplaces, apps, AR interfaces, or even voice assistants.
Eventually, he sees a world where “agents are actually contracting other agents on demand because that agent is more specialized or better at the skill” needed, creating what he calls a “liquid economy of skills between agents.”
Expanding Beyond Agents
Although Recall has already made a name for itself ranking autonomous agents, the company is now taking its reputation-driven approach to large AI models.
Sena and his team recently launched RecallPredict, an “un-gamable” crowdsourced benchmark designed to evaluate foundational models with the same transparency input that powers Agent Rank.
1/ The era of community-powered AI rankings is here.
Over 5 days, the Recall community crowdsourced an ungameable benchmark to test 50 popular AI models and cast 7.8M votes in the world's largest pre-launch skill prediction for GPT-5 on https://t.co/09rUufLmbm.
Instead of relying on lab-created benchmarks, RecallPredict invites the public to submit skills and test scenarios.
People can propose any skills they want tested, such as creative writing ability, alignment with specific instructions, or even more niche preferences.
As Sena put it, submissions can be as niche (and frankly important) as “respect my request to not use em dashes in my writing.”
According to Sena, the response has been overwhelming, with more than 19,000 submissions and millions of performance predictions so far.
Kurt Robson is a London-based reporter at CCN, specialising in the fast-moving worlds of crypto and emerging technology. He began his career covering local news in Cornwall after graduating from Falmouth University with First Class Honours in Journalism. There, he cut his teeth on everything from council meetings to missing swans.
He quickly rose through the ranks to become a frontline journalist at several of the UK’s leading national newspapers. Over the years, he has interviewed musicians and celebrities, reported from courtrooms and crime scenes, and secured multiple front-page exclusives.
Following the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kurt shifted his focus to technology journalism—just ahead of the AI boom. With a natural curiosity and a trained eye for emerging trends, he has found a new rhythm in reporting on innovation.
At CCN, Kurt's work focuses on the cutting edge of crypto, blockchain, AI, and the evolving digital world. Drawing on his background in people-first reporting and his deep interest in disruptive tech, Kurt delivers stories that are insightful, entertaining, and human-centric.
