ABSTRACT
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agents have entered the marketplace. By some estimates, AI Agents, which promise to execute tasks and even take over your computer to do so, present a more than $400 billion market. The potential power of AI Agents has fueled legal scholars’ fears that AI Agents will enable rogue commerce, human manipulation, rampant defamation, and infringement of intellectual property rights. These scholars are calling for regulation before AI Agents cause havoc.
This Article addresses concerns about AI Agents head-on. The Article leverages the socio-legal issues presented by agency law to identify potential problems. It then asks how computer science can solve those problems rather than trying to take rules for humans and impose them on software. This approach shows that core aspects of modern software engineering, particularly client-server architectures, address several of those concerns in ways quite different from – and arguably stronger than – how the law would discipline a human agent.
The Article goes further and probes value alignment – a key part of current computer science best practices for mitigating potential agent harms – to show that agency law demands an update to value-alignment. Last, the Article draws on the theory of explainable AI to offer not only ways to address AI Agent’s mistakes ex post, but also a novel ex ante option. Together, these changes enhance a user’s ability to take action to correct or prevent AI Agent operations. These solutions will enable desired economic outcomes and mitigate perceived risks. In short, despite AI Agents’ increasing capabilities, existing technical and socio-legal governance coupled with continual improvements in value alignment can enable them to meet the demands of law and society.
Deven R Desai and Mark O Riedl, Using Agency Law to Tame AI Agents (2026) 41 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 465.
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