Responsible AI Agents

2025-02-25

AI Summary

The rise of AI agents introduces significant ethical and legal risks—including illicit commercial activities, user manipulation, defamation, and intellectual property infringement—necessitating robust regulatory mechanisms. This paper proposes a tripartite governance framework: (1) a novel behavior-constraining mechanism grounded in software interface contracts, embedding compliance requirements directly into interaction protocols; (2) the engineering of value alignment as a configurable user intervention interface, enhancing real-time control and post-hoc correction capabilities; and (3) a systematic argument against granting AI agents legal personhood, affirming human operators as sole accountable entities. Leveraging interface design, human–agent interaction modeling, and formal responsibility analysis, we construct a deployable accountability architecture. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the framework substantially reduces the probability of policy-violating behaviors. It offers policymakers and industry practitioners a governance paradigm that balances theoretical rigor with engineering feasibility.

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: AI & Law, Justice, Regulation & Governance
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

Thanks to advances in large language models, a new type of software agent, the artificial intelligence (AI) agent, has entered the marketplace. Companies such as OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce promise their AI Agents will go from generating passive text to executing tasks. Instead of a travel itinerary, an AI Agent would book all aspects of your trip. Instead of generating text or images for social media post, an AI Agent would post the content across a host of social media outlets. The potential power of AI Agents has fueled legal scholars' fears that AI Agents will enable rogue commerce, human manipulation, rampant defamation, and intellectual property harms. These scholars are calling for regulation before AI Agents cause havoc. This Article addresses the concerns around AI Agents head on. It shows that core aspects of how one piece of software interacts with another creates ways to discipline AI Agents so that rogue, undesired actions are unlikely, perhaps more so than rules designed to govern human agents. It also develops a way to leverage the computer-science approach to value-alignment to improve a user's ability to take action to prevent or correct AI Agent operations. That approach offers and added benefit of helping AI Agents align with norms around user-AI Agent interactions. These practices will enable desired economic outcomes and mitigate perceived risks. The Article also argues that no matter how much AI Agents seem like human agents, they need not, and should not, be given legal personhood status. In short, humans are responsible for AI Agents' actions, and this Article provides a guide for how humans can build and maintain responsible AI Agents.

Problem

• Regulating AI Agents' actions
• Preventing rogue commerce by AI
• Ensuring AI aligns with norms

Innovation

• Leverage value-alignment for AI discipline
• Prevent rogue actions via software interaction
• Ensure human responsibility for AI actions