Agentic AI is a new liability problem. Our legal system is not ready for it.
The AI industry is in a building frenzy. Agentic systems are being deployed faster than anyone can count. The conversation right now is almost solely focused on the benefits agentic AI can deliver. The liability conversation has barely started.
For text generation, recommendations, and advisory outputs, where a human reviews the AI's work and makes the final call on whether to ship or not, existing legal liability frameworks hold up reasonably well if the output creates harm. Tort law, contract, criminal liability. Imperfect, but workable. The human in the loop is doing real work, using their own judgment, or falling short when they have a legal duty to do so.
Agentic AI changes everything. An agentic AI is a system that, given a goal, independently plans and executes the steps to achieve it, making its own decisions along the way without human approval at each step.
Once you give an agent its initial instructions and it goes to work, autonomously, continuously, around the clock, you have delegated authority and lost control. That agent will make judgment calls you never specifically authorized or foresaw. Some of those calls will cause harm to others. Because agents operate at machine speed and never stop, the liability surface they create will be enormous and categorically different from anything the legal system has had to manage before.
While we build the legal infrastructure to handle this, the questions that will matter most are old ones. Who authorized this? Who built it? Who was supposed to supervise it? Who could have stopped it?
Those questions all point back to humans and corporations, because only humans and corporations have legal personhood. Only they can be required to make others whole. The machines don't answer for anything. The people and institutions that deploy agentic AI will have to answer.
Right now the harms are isolated and manageable. But agentic AI is expanding fast, with almost no regulatory infrastructure in place. When the liability wave hits, and it will, it will not look like anything we have seen before.