Following Australia’s first reported automated hacking accident, experts warn deployers – and possibly developers – of AI agents could be held liable for the actions of their bots
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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.
