US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.
What if no one told it to do what it did?
Not possible. AI doesn’t work like that. You can automate telling it what to do, but someone has to write the prompt. Agents are where it gets interesting. Because the AI tells them what to do for you based on what you told it to do. But the agent is often a customized ai. And it can even be a product that a business sells. So one could argue that to some extent the business that created the agent have responsibility. I think the reality is a mix. If I tell my AI to tell the agent to do something illegal, I am certianly partly responsible. But if the agent was sold with a feature that claims to stop it from doing the illegal thing I told it, now they have some responsibility.
Someone sets it into a prompt loop.