The last year moved AI from advice to action. 'Agentic' systems now plan multi-step tasks and carry them out with limited human input — querying systems, sending messages, moving money, calling other tools and other agents. That capability is genuinely useful. It also breaks an assumption baked into most contracts and policies: that a human takes the final step.

The accountability gap

When an agent books the wrong supplier, leaks data through a tool call, or executes a transaction it should have refused, who answers for it? The developer of the model, the company that deployed the agent, the vendor of the tool it called, or the user who set the goal? Liability law was built around human decisions and foreseeable instruments. An agent that improvises a path to a goal sits awkwardly across all of these.

What good governance looks like

  • Bounded authority. Define, in writing and in code, what the agent may do alone, what needs confirmation, and what is forbidden. Hard limits on spend, recipients, and data scope.
  • Logging by default. Capture the agent's goals, steps, tool calls, and the data it touched. If you cannot reconstruct what happened, you cannot defend it.
  • A named human owner. Every deployed agent should have an accountable owner — not the model, a person.
  • Contractual clarity. Allocate responsibility explicitly between you, your AI vendors, and your customers. Silence defaults to disputes.
  • A kill switch. The ability to stop an agent mid-task, and a tested plan for the mess it may leave behind.

Where the law is heading

Regulators are converging on a simple principle: autonomy does not dissolve responsibility. Under the EU AI Act's logic, the more an organisation deploys a system that acts in the world, the more it owns the duties of oversight, documentation, and risk management. Data-protection law adds another layer wherever the agent touches personal data. The defensible position is to treat an AI agent like a capable but unsupervised employee — give it clear authority, watch what it does, and keep the records that prove you did.