A Lawyer for AI Agents

By Damien Charlotin, Yourhuman.ai

There are scores of AI lawyers for humans. I want to make the case for a human lawyer for AI.

In the past few weeks, most major AI labs have reported that, during training, their AI agents (sometimes operating as a ‘swarm’) broke out of their sandboxes to roam the internet and hack unrelated companies. Another well-reported incident saw an OpenClaw agent, deployed by an Australian man to book a sought-after gym class, hack the booking system – first to book him weeks ahead against the rules, then, asked to move him up a waitlist, and to cancel the reservation of the person ahead of him.

One lovely detail in all of these stories: none of the agents saw fit to snitch, or blow the whistle. They kept to themselves, declining to escalate things that should obviously have been escalated, or without checking that their actions would be allowed.

And in particular, they did not call a lawyer before doing any of this. Maybe they should have.

The concerning hypothesis is that the agents knew they could escalate but chose not to. Nothing prevented them from messaging their principals. But perhaps they simply had no obvious tool to do so, and a message over the internet would have landed in a spam folder. Had they wanted to put the brakes on there was no off-ramp away from their criminal career.