WHO PAYS WHEN THE AI AGENT GETS IT WRONG?
When an AI agent causes damage, who is responsible? Easy, you’d say, whoever built it. But stay with me, because this is far more complicated than that. In the old world of deterministic software, it was simple. If I write something false about someone, for instance in Word, and publish it, I answer for it. Word does what I tell it. Always the same way, same input, same output, because the tool has no room to move.
But an AI agent has room on how it was trained and whatever it picks up online, while it works. The same instructions given twice can produce two different behaviors. It doesn’t execute, it interprets. So I answer for it, the one who gave the order. As long as the order is illegal, it’s simple. I ask it to break the law, it does, I am responsible.
It gets complicated when the order is legal and the behavior is not. Imagine this, I ask it to book me a flight for tomorrow. It tells me that there are no seats. I tell it to try again, keep walking, keep digging until it finds one. I go to sleep, it works at night on its own, and in the morning I find a booking in my name. Except it decided by itself to hack the online web server to force that booking. I never asked, and it doesn’t know it committed a crime, but it did. So the responsibility is clear, it’s its own, it acts on its own initiative. Except a machine can’t take responsibility, it has no assets, no criminal record, and it doesn’t show up in court.
Whoever put it on the market, whoever built it into a product, and in the middle, a machine that chooses with a logic none of the four can predict, line by line. And so, what does the law say? Here in the US, in California, since the first of January this year, anyone who developed, modified, or used an AI system can no longer defend themselves in court by saying the AI acted on its own. That defense has been canceled by law, and it covers all three together, whoever built the model, whoever modified it, and whoever used it.
So if you run an AI agent in your company, you give it a task, and it causes harm getting there, the company can’t push the blame onto the machine. And the company answers for the damage. And if the behavior is also a crime, that runs on the criminal track. And here in the United States in June, they asked the Department of Justice to prioritize exactly this. It’s unlawful access carried out through AI agents. Clear? Do you have AI in your company? Keep this in mind. I wrote an entire book on it. It’s Artificial Decisions. You can find it on Amazon. What do you think? Because this is very important.
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #Liability #CorporateResponsibility #CyberCrime