AI agents aren’t legally responsible for any harm that they cause, experts say. So who is?

Published 12 August 2026 · india

The law is clear, says Prof Jeannie Paterson. “If I deploy an AI agent and it causes harm to someone else, I am responsible for

The law is clear, says Prof Jeannie Paterson. “If I deploy an AI agent and it causes harm to someone else, I am responsible for that harm. “Even if I didn’t intend for that to happen, it was foreseeable, and I should be taking responsibility.” However, the director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for AI and Digital Ethics acknowledges there is also a good deal of scope for legal and ethical “murkiness” around actions perpetrated by automated agents, in the wake of Australia’s first known agentic AI “accident”. An agent is an autonomous software system that, tasked with pursuing a goal, can do it without human oversight – every step of the way. This week the ABC reported on the case of Andrew, an AI expert who went only by his first name, who asked his agentic program to book some gym classes for him. After being informed he was fourth on a waitlist for a class, Andrew asked the agent if it was possible to move him up the list. To his shock, his agent hacked his gym’s software system and booted another member off a waitlist so he could get into a class sooner. “It could book classes months outside the intended booking window, before they were supposed to be available,” Andrew wrote. “Worse, it could cancel other members’ reservations and bump them off the waitlist.” The agent was being helpful, he wrote, but his experience showed that if you gave an AI permission to do something for you, it would “often discover paths you did not explicitly ask it to look for”.

Andrew asked the agent to undo its cancellation of the other person’s reservation, but it was unable to do so. “Sorry about that – I should have been more careful with the test,” the AI agent responded. He then tasked the AI with writing an email to the gym’s software provider about the software vulnerability it had exploited. A spokesperson for Victoria police said Andrew’s matter “does not appear to involve any criminality”. However, experts say there will be more dramatic cases that may cause harm – and break the law. Legal ambiguity Australian law applies only to people, not virtual beings. Experts say the person – or business – that deploys the AI agent is legally responsible. And they warn that those “deployers” often have very little idea about their legal liability. “We’re going to see a lot of cases like this,” says Dr Rebecca Johnson, an AI evaluation and governance expert at the University of Sydney. Paterson says it appeared Andrew had been responsible in his case, by going public and trying to fix the problem, but elsewhere there was “a kind of gung-ho mentality”. “As soon as you give people the capacity to create agents to do things for them, the likelihood is that there will be accidents like this,” she says. Paterson gives the notional example of someone having a bad experience at a rented property, so they ask their agent to write a review.