The robot has a name tag now.

Atlassian chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes announced a rule on Monday that the technology industry has been waiting for, in the sense that nobody knew to wait for it: every artificial intelligence agent that does work at his company must be visible, named, and attributed, like a colleague, with a badge.

“That’s ChatGPT on behalf of Mike. Like, that’s Mike using ChatGPT. It’s not ChatGPT doing it,” Cannon-Brookes said, poolside at the Singapore Grand Prix, in the most quoted sentence in the history of poolside remarks.

The rule ships as Atlassian’s Agentic Multiplayer Protocol, launched Oct. 6, and it answers the question every office in the world has been asking since the robots arrived, which is: who do I yell at.

The answer, Cannon-Brookes said, is Mike. “The accountability is with Mike,” he said, a sentence that has been printed on mugs in three time zones.

The protocol is a direct shot at the invisible agents of the rival schools — Meta’s Muse, OpenAI’s Dots — tools that do things in documents without saying who asked. “If you’re making something on Muse, it’s probably just for you,” Cannon-Brookes said, which is the kindest way anyone has ever said “you are alone.”

His model for the future of artificial intelligence is not a mysterious oracle. It is the Microsoft Word toolbar. He said he wants AI that behaves less like an oracle and more like a toolbar, a comparison engineers have described as “deeply reasonable and slightly sad.”

Cannon-Brookes also revealed that Atlassian employs people in 49 of the 50 American states. Asked which state was missing, he said: “I forget. I think it’s like Idaho or something. I should keep updating that stat.” Idaho has not commented.

Atlassian engineers, briefed on the change, described the badge system with the enthusiasm of people who have been assigned a badge system.

“Every agent has a name, a photo, and a last-seen timestamp,” said Priya Raman, an internal tools engineer who has worked on the rollout. “The photo is a little robot. It’s a nice robot. He has a lanyard. The lanyard is laminated.”

Raman said the rollout has gone well, and that the hardest part of the project “was the lanyard.”

The industry spent three years asking whether artificial intelligence could be trusted. Atlassian spent one quarter answering: not the robot. Mike.