Lawyers
Litigation partner Anna Gressel was featured on the July 21 episode of Google’s “Cloud Security Podcast,” titled “The Autonomous Frontier: Governing AI Agents from Code to Courtroom.” During an in-depth conversation with the hosts, Anna discusses the risks posed by AI agents and agentic AI, as well as how legal and regulatory frameworks may need to adapt to this emerging technology. “Almost every legal area is going to be affected in a new way by agents, in the same way that AI itself affects almost every legal area,” Anna says. “Regulatory risks, IP risks, cyber risks, privacy risks, liability risks, they’re all relevant and that’s true for agents too.”
Agentic AI differs from generative AI in that it performs autonomous decision-making tasks on a user’s behalf, such as booking airline tickets or making hotel reservations. Because of the interplay involving humans, systems and AI, Anna also discusses how a unique legal and regulatory ecosystem will need to develop to support this unique technology. A useful analogy, she says, is envisioning AI agents as cars on a highway, with universally understood signals that indicate what they can and cannot do. “We have to agree that a stop sign’s a stop sign and a yield sign’s a yield sign … this whole ecosystem relies on these communication norms and these dispute resolution norms,” Anna says. “A lot of people are going to come together to create both technologies and terms, and those are all going to have to move in transit together.”
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