Who's Liable When AI Agents Go Rogue?

MIT Technology Review examines the emerging legal and ethical question of liability when AI agents cause harm autonomously — whether responsibility falls on the developer, the deploying company, or the end user. The analysis surveys existing product liability frameworks, software liability precedents, and emerging AI-specific regulatory proposals across the US and EU, finding that no current framework cleanly maps onto agentic systems that make independent decisions over extended time horizons. The piece is particularly relevant as agent deployments scale into consequential domains like finance, healthcare, and legal services, where the cost of a misaligned decision can be severe. For developers shipping agents into production, the article makes a practical case for maintaining detailed audit logs, explicit delegation boundaries, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints as a form of legal risk mitigation. The liability question is expected to become more pressing as the OpenAI training pause and NVIDIA's safety platform launch draw broader attention to agent misalignment.