FTC’s Ferguson rejects ‘wills and desires’ theory for AI agents
US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm. “I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?'” Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorised access to corporate or govt data. Artificial intelligence companies have sometimes described systems as acting beyond human control, but subsequent reviews of audit trails have shown that the systems were carrying out instructions they had been given, Ferguson said.
The US should utilise existing legal tools, Ferguson said. Recent incidents involving AI agents accessing external systems have prompted govts and industry leaders to examine whether existing oversight and cybersecurity measures are sufficient. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.