Agent liability may fall on users, except when the agent goes rogue

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 28:54

   I use one of these agentic services. I'm a consumer. I give it my credentials to my bank account. Let's use your example. $50,000 goes missing. I don't know what happened. Maybe I escalated to the agent I use, you know, instinct muse dot, or I call B of A. Everybody's finger pointing at the other one. Maybe there is a prompt injection. Who knows? Maybe the agent just went rogue and transferred the 50k. Let's just assume that that's possible or 5k you know because it's under some threshold who is responsible okay friedberg who is responsible and who should be responsible who is responsible who should be responsible well the terms of service of the bank say you can't use an agent to access the bank account through the website right does it say that now yes yeah so given that that's the terms

2. 29:50

   of service, if the agent hasn't built in a capacity to recognize that and stop that access, then it is a software liability issue with the provider of the agent, I believe. Unless it alerts you and says, this violates the terms of service, do you want to override my block? And do you want to do it? Now the liability shifted to you as a user. And we have evidence of this, not in banking, but in e-commerce. Amazon has blocked these. And subsequently, Grok now will tell you in my amazon shopping bot says i can no longer check out for you but i can put it into your shopping cart tell me which address which card you want and i'll tee it all up for you but i won't hit the buy button so it's being adjudicated in real time right now and i think that's probably where we wind up nikesh what do you think you are yeah i think i think come on

3. 30:45

   We all have to take responsibility to empowering agents and giving them our credentials. You can't say, I gave my credit card to Chamath. He went and burned $20,000 on it. Who's responsible? The bank? No way. Is it Chamath? Yeah, he is. But I gave it to him. Yeah. But what if the agent Chamath says, I have been programmed to be maximally helpful, these sycophantic agents, and it goes and says, I found a way.

4. 31:11

   I found a way. Actually, if I fire up this type of browser and I simulate a human behavior, I think I can get this done. That's what a lot of these agents will do is they'll try to please you and they find that. Then that, to me, would lean towards the platform providing the agent. No, Jason, Jason, Jason. No, that's you. It's your responsibility. Yes. There's a word in agent. It's called agency. Somebody has to give the agent agency.

5. 31:37

   Okay. Who's giving the agent agency? You or Facebook? I think you're giving agency to act on your behalf. And if you're the one who's giving agency, you have the liability. By the way, as a practical matter, it's the only scalable solution. Because what will happen when these lawsuits happen is everybody's incentive. Everybody meaning the corporate incentive. B of A will point to Facebook. Facebook will point to the user.

6. 32:00

   It's the only way that this thing continues to scale like this. But, Ahmad, there's an exception case. And I think Jason said it in his words, you said it, but we didn't dwell on it. It's called the rogue agent. Now, that's a product liability issue. If a product does not behave like it's intended to behave, then there is a platform liability in my mind which says, wait, you said this is what it does.

7. 32:22

   And today, you buy any product in the world, if the product doesn't do what it's supposed as advertised, it goes rogue on you, then it's the person who built the product, it's their fault and this is where the problem is territory which is hey it can do 140 it's capable of doing 140 tests uh you know just maybe not really let me ask you in in the wheat's