ABSTRACT
This Essay shines a light on a challenge created by the rapid mainstreaming of AI agents for consumer use. An AI agent’s value proposition is that they can, without explicit user intervention, perform tasks and actions to the user’s benefit. Delivering on this proposition often requires that the AI agent transact with third parties purportedly on behalf of the user; the third party and the user end up in an AI agent-mediated interaction, the purpose of which is mostly known to the third party.
But this interaction with the user is not the only type of interaction that the third party engages in. Most modern AI agents are developed by companies specializing in AI development and are provided as cloud-connected services. This means that when the third party interfaces with the AI agent, they are interacting not only with the users who initiate the AI agent’s actions but with these companies. However, as the third party is not in a direct relationship with the companies that develop these AI agents, the third party risks being left in the dark about the interactions with these companies: with whom they are interacting, or what kind of interaction they are engaging in.
In this Essay, I examine the questions arising from this hidden interaction between the third party and the developers, which I call the ‘interactions behind AI agents’. Focusing on consumer protection law’s consumer privacy protection function, I explore where existing laws provide no-worse-than-before protection to third parties individuals and where there may be gaps, particularly when the users of AI agents are consumers themselves, as the existing levers of consumer protection law may not easily apply when the AI agent-mediated interaction looks to be between two individuals as opposed to between a consumer and a company. From this analysis, this Essay explores how consumer protection law may be expanded to narrow this gap.
Lee, Christina, Protecting Consumers in the Interactions Behind AI Agents (May 27, 2026), 40 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology (forthcoming 2027).
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