Before we power businesses with AI agents, we need to bridge the accountability gap

Date:
Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:35:43 +0000

Description:
Give an agent the power to submit a filing, and liability becomes urgent.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter When businesses and governments delegate operational tasks to AI agents, the discussion tends to start with capability. Can AI do what a person can do, such as reconcile accounts, negotiate with suppliers, sign a document or submit a public filing? And can it do so quickly and cheaply enough to justify putting it to work?

These questions matter, but performance is only part of the picture. Once an agent acts independently, different questions emerge; who authorized it,
whose interests does it represent, where does its authority end and, perhaps most importantly, who is responsible when something goes wrong? Liina Vahtras Social Links Navigation

Managing Director at e-Residency. This is the accountability gap in agentic AI, and a more advanced model will not close it. An agent might be remarkably capable, yet still act with potentially unwanted or possibly even unlawful consequences. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here:

The only way to bridge that gap is through a system with clear permission guardrails and an audit trail that links each agentic action to the person that authorized it, and can tell the difference between a person and a
machine in the first place. Ordinary error at extraordinary scale When people think about AI risk, they tend to picture a machine breaking free of human control and pursuing goals of its own. The more immediate risk is less dramatic; a system simply getting an ordinary task wrong, again and again, with no clear line of responsibility and accountability. You may like Govern AI agents before they go rogue AI agents in live operations require new standards and management Why AI coding agents keep stalling before production and the governance controls that fix it

A person might send an invoice to the wrong customer. An agent connected to the full customer database could send the same invoice to thousands. It might change the wrong field and then repeat the change across an entire market,
not because it has become malicious, but because it has misunderstood an instruction and had the access to act on that.

The speed that makes an agent valuable can save a business hundreds of hours, but can also turn a small and recoverable mistake into a serious operational problem. Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.

When an agent drafts an email for someone to review, this ambiguity may not matter very much because the person remains between the software and the outside world.

But when it can send the message, submit a declaration or move money, it matters a great deal. Imagine asking an assistant to book one flight and, instead of giving them a company card with an appropriate spending limit, handing over your passport, bank card and office keys. You may trust the assistant completely, but the permissions bear no sensible relation to the task. Define the boundaries, solve the problem AI agents cannot hold citizenship or legal personhood, but they can be linked to natural persons in legally sound ways. For example, a reliable identifier could trace the
agent's activity back to the person responsible for deploying it. Combined with clear permissions and mandates that make the terms of its authority visible and auditable, this would allow AI agents to carry out a range of operations and transactions in a more controlled way. What to read next
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These controls could be very precise. An agent might be allowed to view financial information but not change it, prepare a payment but not approve it or order from named suppliers without exceeding a fixed amount. Its permissions might last for one transaction, one working day or the duration
of a particular contract, after which it would expire without relying on someone to remember to switch it off.

Withdrawing that authority should be equally straightforward. If a company ends its relationship with an agent, changes supplier, or discovers that something is wrong, it should be able to cancel the its access without changing the credentials of the person behind it.

The agents legally anchored mandate in the various realms of these controls has a longer shelf life than any individual AI model, which will be upgraded, replaced and combined over time, often without the customer seeing much more than a new version number. Putting the idea into practice Estonia has decided to work through these questions now. In June, the government began developing a state-backed registration system for AI agents that will be available to both Estonian citizens and the countrys global community of entrepreneurs.
The goal is to explore how Estonias fully digital state, where all public services are available online, can be opened to the emerging wave of AI-powered businesses.

Under the current proposal, a person would receive a registered numeric identifier that could be linked to one or more agents acting on their behalf. Operations performed by an AI agent are treated as operations performed by a machine, for which the natural person, the identity anchor, is liable. The AI agent can only operate within the limits of the authorizations granted to it.

For transparency, private service providers also need to know whether an operation was performed by a person or by a machine acting on their behalf. This allows them to apply appropriate controls, restrictions and risk models. Built for delegation The approach draws on more than two decades of digital government. Estonias system of personal identifiers and digital identities already allows people to act on behalf of others with clearly defined permissions.

An accountant can file a clients taxes, an adult can manage an elderly
parents affairs through the health portal, and several people can use a corporate bank account with individual rights and limits. In principle, the same framework could support mandates for AI agents.

This would give users greater confidence that safeguards are in place to protect the responsible person from foreseeable errors by an AI agent. It would also help close the accountability gap as agentic activity increases.

Before AI agents are given executive powers, they need a technically and legally binding framework that records who they represent, what they can do and who remains responsible for their actions. We've featured the best AI tool. This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives , our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

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