Fassbender warns trust is harder online as The Agency returns

The comments give extra weight to a series already built around espionage, AI and the personal cost of living a double life. The show, previously titled The Agency: Central Intelligence, stars Fassbender as CIA officer Martian and also features Jeffrey Wright, Jodie Turner-Smith, Richard Gere and Katherine Waterston. Paramount+ said the first season drew 5.1 million cross-platform viewers globally in its first weekend, a strong launch that helped set up the return.

Fassbender’s remarks resonate because the line between fiction and reality has become harder to draw far beyond television. Pew Research Center found that 51% of U.S. adults are more concerned than excited about AI, reflecting unease not just about what the technology can do, but about what it can obscure. Deepfakes, synthetic audio and convincingly altered images have made it easier to confuse deception with evidence, and harder for ordinary users to tell whether a post, clip or voice message is authentic.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has warned that criminals are increasingly using AI-generated deepfakes, text messages and voice messages to impersonate officials and scam people. Its Internet Crime Complaint Center says it has received more than 4.2 million fraud reports since 2020, with losses reaching $50.5 billion, a scale that shows how quickly digital impersonation has moved from nuisance to major criminal threat. In that environment, the basic habits of verification matter more than ever: check whether a claim appears on the original account or site, look for corroboration from more than one credible source, compare suspicious images or audio with known originals, and treat urgent requests for money, passwords or personal information as warning signs.