Programming-agent intelligence war sees Factory advisor accused of leaking to Cognition, testing Silicon Valley governance

A unprecedented public clash erupted in the AI programming-agent sector after Mattan Greenberg, co-founder and CEO of Factory, announced the dismissal of board advisor Chris Dignan on accusations of leaking confidential information to the leading rival Cognition, developer of the programming agent Devine. The incident is especially sensitive given Dignan’s former role as the first sales executive at Snowflake and his eleven-year tenure as head of revenue there, before becoming a partner at RPT Partners, an investor in Factory, and an advisor to Iconic.

The response came quickly on digital platforms, with Dignan announcing after only two hours that he had taken the role of chief revenue officer at Cognition, denying his dismissal and confirming that he had resigned, rejecting a full-time offer from Factory. The shift did not stop at Dignan’s individual move; he also revealed that the RPT Partners fund and its managing partner Chad Bates would work closely with Cognition. And this step placesSharp questions about confidentiality limits and board-room ethicswhen a consultant privy to the technical roadmap and competitive gap-closing becomes an executive leader at the direct rival overnight.

The battle reflected the widening gap in investment and financial power between the two sides; while Factory succeeded in raising two hundred million dollars at a five-billion-dollar valuation in September 2026 with backing from Husla Ventures, Blackstone, Sequoia Capital and Insight Partners, and delivered its services to major clients such as Nvidia and Adobe, Cognition secured two billion dollars in funding and a forty-eight-billion-dollar valuation based on contracts with giants including Mercedes-Benz, NASA and Goldman Sachs. Yet this disparity did not prevent the conflict from tearing apart the investors themselves, as Vinod Husla, an investor in both companies, sided with Cognition and described Factory as a struggling competitor lacking proper conduct, while his fellow fund partner Keith Rapua attacked Dignan’s actions, calling his interviewing a rival while attending board meetings a breach of professional norms.

Scott Wu, chief executive of Cognition, tried to absorb the escalation by asserting that his company was not interested in Factory’s secrets, but the incident coincided with a broader review by the U.S. Department of Justice of venture-capital partners’ participation, such as Andreessen Horowitz, on the boards of competing firms. This dispute confirms thatthe era of good intentions and normalising conflicts of interest within the AI ecosystem has reached its endas independent programming algorithms have become a fierce commercial battle to win major corporate contracts.

Across the Gulf, Egypt and the Levant, this conflict carries direct practical repercussions for technology leaders, procurement officers and regional investors. The heated rivalry between Devine and competing platforms means that pricing for programming agents and compliance terms are set to shift, requiring IT directors in Gulf banks and telecom companies to scrutinise safeguards for source code and sensitive data when outsourcing development to external agents whose developers face ownership disputes and trade-secret conflicts. Moreover, this landscape puts venture-capital funds and startups in Riyadh, Dubai and Cairo before a decisive regulatory imperative: tightening non-disclosure agreements and reviewing the governance of advisory seats so that local boards do not become leakage channels that strip emerging innovations of their value for better-funded entities.

What we see today proves that building autonomous programming agents is no longer merely a race of computational models, but has turned intoan institutional dominance struggle driven by market intelligence and complex investment alliancesAnd if you are planning to build a development environment that relies on smart agents or are looking to invest in software-engineering tools, your next benchmark will not be limited to code-writing efficiency, but will extend to the platform’s legal robustness and the stability of its regulatory umbrella in the face of the fallout from these major confrontations.