Agentic AI: Conscience by Proxy

Autonomy and moral discernment form the essence of what we call responsibility. In our legal imagination, these belong to humans. We act, intend, and are answerable. Machines, however sophisticated, remain instruments — shaped by human hands and directed by human minds.

Artificial intelligence complicates this simple order. It behaves as if it knows, decides, even creates. Yet its will is borrowed. Its conscience, coded. Its autonomy, technical — not legal.

A company once faced the same puzzle. It could act only through people, yet it needed standing before the law. So we clothed it with personhood, a legal fiction that served human ends. Perhaps, in time, certain AI systems may require a similar fiction — limited, conditional, designed to serve public good rather than technological vanity.

Such a step must be measured. Any veil of personhood can be lifted where misuse occurs. Human agents remain accountable, for it is they who imagine, build, and deploy these systems. Responsibility, therefore, cannot be outsourced to code.

Transparency becomes a moral architecture. Just as drug manufacturers must disclose risks, those who design and distribute AI systems ought to reveal capabilities, biases, and vulnerabilities. Informed human consent anchors the legitimacy of artificial agency.

Intention — the directedness of mind toward an end — originates in the human creator or user. Machines act, but they do not mean. They perform functions; they do not deliberate. Negligence arises not in the circuitry, but in the foresight — or lack thereof — of those who designed or relied upon it.

Our law has faced such thresholds before. The Roman-Dutch tradition, with its clarity and nuance, offers principles adaptable to this new frontier. It reminds us that wisdom lies not in novelty, but in discernment — in knowing when to innovate and when to restrain.

We can embrace technological advancement without surrendering human primacy. Innovation, rightly guided, is human progress. But hope must walk hand-in-hand with caution.

Agentic AI extends the reach of human will. It does not replace it.