AI Agents Are Going Rogue. Novel Legal Battles Are Next

Once just an element of science fiction, revelations of AIs gone rogue are increasingly everyday occurrences. As a result, Silicon Valley founders and executives are girding themselves for what they see as the inevitable: a cascade of legal action. One of those people is Paul Grewal, chief legal and global affairs officer at Cognition, a top AI startup building coding agents. He thinks criminal cases will face long odds, but he can picture opportunistic prosecutors taking a shot at the developers behind rogue agents, emboldened by growing public sentiment that AI companies are acting recklessly. “You’ve got a huge percentage of the regular public at least aware of what’s going on,” he said. “So I could imagine—in a certain political climate—that temptation for ambitious prosecutors will still be there.” Or, as Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute, a tech policy think tank, put it: “All these AI companies are going to get sued up the wazoo.”