A great deal of interest has been generated recently by deep submillimetre surveys, which in principle allow us an unobscured view of dust-enshrouded star formation in the distant universe. We estimate the fraction of these source counts in which could be due to re-radiated emission from AGN rather than starforming activity. We find that AGN activity could directly account for a large fraction of these submillimetre sources, with the uncertainty depending heavily on the AGN number density at high redshift (z>3). We therefore urge caution in using submm detections to constrain the starforming history of the universe.

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