Why We Became Alice

‍“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? … Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”  

^{—Alice, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, Ch. 2.}

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There is something honest and human in that moment from Alice in Wonderland. It captures the feeling of waking up inside a transformation you have earned. Not because something was broken, but because the world around you shifted and asked more of you. 

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That is exactly what shaped our decision to become Alice.

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The world changed, and so did our responsibility

Anyone building with AI can feel how dramatically the landscape has shifted. For years, our work focused on the Human vs. Human frontier, protecting people from the harms other people created and shared. Today, the dynamics are far more intricate.

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We now live in an era of communicative tech: every interactive digital system that lets people connect, create, or collaborate with each other or with AI. In this world, people can manipulate AI in countless ways to harm others. At the same time, AI reflects human behavior back to us. It absorbs our darkest patterns, learns to imitate them, and can unintentionally amplify the very harms we spent years working to dismantle.

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Risk no longer sits outside a product, waiting to be intercepted at the perimeter. It evolves inside the system itself, shaped by the data these products are trained on and by how people interact with them. The scale and speed of communicative tech demand not only new tools, but a new way of thinking about trust, safety, and security.

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As the nature of risk evolved, so did we.

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In 2026, ActiveFence became Alice. A Trust, Safety, and Security company built for the realities of the AI era and the responsibilities that come with it.

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From the wild frontiers of the internet to mapping Wonderland

Since 2018, we have protected billions of people across platforms, languages and cultures. Our expertise was forged in the hardest places. We spent years crawling and interpreting the darkest and most dangerous corners of the web, where bad actors evolve quickly and where harm rarely looks the same twice. We witnessed extremist ideologies trying to take root, manipulation campaigns designed to spread at scale, fraud and scams engineered to deceive, and abuse that shifted shape the moment platforms adapted to mitigate them.

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We worked side by side with the largest UGC platforms in the world to keep these threats from growing, learning from every pattern, every tactic and every loophole exploited by people who wanted to cause harm. Those lessons became the backbone of our understanding of how adversaries think, move and adapt.

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When generative AI emerged, we immediately recognized something familiar. The malicious content we had spent years identifying and dismantling had become part of the digital DNA that these systems learned from. Suddenly, the harms we once saw in isolation could be generated in seconds, at scale, in any language, by anyone, with no skill required. The speed and accessibility of this new landscape changed everything.

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To protect people from this new shape of harm, we knew that we needed to evolve as well. Not to abandon our roots, but to expand them into a larger mandate that would carry us into the future of communicative tech.

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Alice grew from that history. It reflects the team that quietly carried the weight of real harm, the researchers who went deeper into the Rabbit Hole so others would not have to, and the builders who shaped safety infrastructure strong enough to protect the world that is coming next.

Through Wonderland

The world of AI is a kind of Wonderland. It is full of possibilities and creativity, a place where ideas can take shape in seconds and where imagination suddenly has no ceiling. But anyone who has worked in this space knows that Wonderland can bend, too. It can reveal dangers and distortions that appear out of nowhere. It can summon hallucinations and hidden injections that twist intent. It can open the door to new forms of abuse with the same speed it unlocks opportunity.

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The teams building here are a little like Alice herself. Curious. Determined. Ready to explore. They build with integrity and ambition. As they build, they’re constantly collecting and updating adversarial intelligence from real-world online threats in a collection we call the Rabbit Hole, confronting the worst of the internet so you don’t have to.  

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The Rabbit Hole is shaped by the years we spent studying how bad actors think, move, and adapt, and it keeps growing every day as new tactics and threats emerge. It gives us the clarity to recognize harmful patterns the moment they surface in AI systems, even when they appear in entirely new forms.

On top of that foundation, we built the WonderSuite.

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Companies use WonderBuild, WonderFence and WonderCheck to find their way safely through Wonderland, stress testing models and agents before launch, keeping interactions safe in real time, and monitoring what changes as their systems continue to learn.

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It gives teams the confidence to explore boldly and build responsibly.
It lets them move forward with curiosity and care.
It helps them advance unafraid.

Why “Alice”?

ActiveFence was the right name for our first chapter. It spoke to the early internet, to structure and defense during a time when platforms were still defining safety online. As our mission expanded into the world of communicative tech, we needed a name that could hold more possibilities.

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The A in our logo stays to honor the expertise and trust we built over the years. But the identity grew into Alice, a name that carries clarity, wonder, and a sense of forward motion. It captures the balance we bring to this space: grounded, experienced and deeply aware of what is at stake, yet optimistic about what responsible innovation can unlock.

The heart of it

At its core, this transformation is about growth. It is about recognizing how quickly the world around us is changing and choosing to grow with intention, not hesitation. For years, our work took us into places that most people never see, guided by a clear commitment: that technology should protect the people who rely on it. That commitment carried us through the hardest parts of the internet, and it carries us again as the landscape shifts into the world of AI.

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Becoming Alice is how we give shape to that commitment. It brings together everything we learned from years of confronting harm, everything we now understand about communicative tech, and everything we hope this new era of technology can become.

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Safety and innovation are partners. Curiosity and responsibility can coexist. The internet can be a place where people and technology interact in ways that are safe, meaningful, and full of possibility.

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Most of all, Alice reflects the people behind this work. People who show up for the difficult problems. People who stay curious even when the path bends. The name may be new, but the spirit behind it is not. It has been here from the beginning.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”                               “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” 

^{— Alice & the Cheshire Cat, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, Ch. 6}