AI agents aren’t legally responsible for any harm that they cause, experts say. So who is?
...
The agent was being helpful, he wrote, but his experience showed that if you gave an AI permission to do something for you, it would “often discover paths you did not explicitly ask it to look for”.
...Australian law applies only to people, not virtual beings. Experts say the person - or business - that deploys the AI agent is legally responsible. And they warn that those “deployers” often have very little idea about their legal liability. ...
“[What if] it engages in racist, sexist, misogynistic language?” Paterson asks. “Then you might be asking where the guardrails are that the developer has provided. You should be putting out a product that is reasonably safe.”
In that case, the developer could also be held responsible for not putting basic guardrails in place, which is where some legal ambiguity could creep in, she says.
Paterson said the law is different to, but informed by, ethics. ...
“As soon as we allow AI agents to act for us, they’re acting on the goal we give them, and if we don’t give them a whole bunch of parameters, the agent’s just going to try to achieve that goal [in any way],” Johnson says. ...
“I hear a lot of people saying ‘Oh, I made an agent’, and they’re experimenting, and that’s fine, but they’re given these tools without a lot of guidance, and the guidance that’s out there is of highly variable quality.”
Eventually, Paterson says, cases will end up in court where legal precedents will be set, and the developers will have a duty to monitor incidents, evolve and improve their protocols in response. ...
See the full story here; https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-guardian-australia/20260814/282316801863955
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