Our Head of Policy, Matt Boulos, published a piece in Lawfare arguing that the legal frameworks we create for AI agents will determine whether individuals reclaim control over digital spaces, or surrender personal freedom to increasingly powerful tech platforms. Read his full piece here.
Twenty-five years ago, legal scholar Lawrence Lessig warned that the architecture of technology—what he called “code”—could become one of the greatest threats to modern liberty, if not for the potential of markets and norms to moderate that risk. He turned out to be half right: Code has since done what he feared it might, but markets have only amplified these effects, and norms have done little to constrain them.
We’re now left with law as a last resort, but it may be enough to secure a future in which AI agents can act as a counterbalance to tech’s current trajectory. AI agents—systems that work intelligently and autonomously for a user—are the next step after large language models (LLMs). They work by turning the output of those models into an intelligible sequence of real actions. We now have a critical choice to make about what they will become: The legal framework we give them will either mean that this individualized power tempers the current lawlessness of our digital lives, or render us all the more subject to it.