Simply two and a half years after OpenAI shocked the world with ChatGPT, AI is now not solely answering questions — it’s taking actions. We are actually coming into the period of AI brokers, through which AI giant language fashions don’t simply passively present data in response to your queries, they actively go into the world and do issues for — or doubtlessly in opposition to — you.
AI has the ability to put in writing essays and reply complicated questions, however think about for those who may enter a immediate and have it make a physician’s appointment primarily based in your calendar, or e book a household flight along with your bank card, or file a authorized case for you in small claims court docket.
An AI agent submitted this op-ed. (I did, nonetheless, write the op-ed myself as a result of I figured the Los Angeles Instances wouldn’t publish an AI-generated piece, and moreover I can put in random references like I’m a Cleveland Browns fan as a result of no AI would ever admit to that.)
I instructed my AI agent to seek out out what electronic mail tackle The Instances makes use of for op-ed submissions, the necessities for the submission, after which to draft the e-mail title, draft an attention grabbing pitch paragraph, connect my op-ed and submit the package deal. I pressed “return,” “monitor job” and “affirm.” The AI agent accomplished the duties in a couple of minutes.
A couple of minutes will not be speedy, and these weren’t difficult requests. However with every passing month the brokers get quicker and smarter. I used Operator by OpenAI, which is in analysis preview mode. Google’s Undertaking Mariner, which can be a analysis prototype, can carry out comparable agentic duties. A number of corporations now supply AI brokers that may make telephone requires you — in your voice or one other voice — and have a dialog with the particular person on the different finish of the road primarily based in your directions.
Quickly AI brokers will carry out extra complicated duties and be broadly obtainable for the general public to make use of. That raises quite a lot of unresolved and vital considerations. Anthropic does security testing of its fashions and publishes the outcomes. Considered one of its checks confirmed that the Claude Opus 4 mannequin would doubtlessly notify the press or regulators if it believed you have been doing one thing egregiously immoral. Ought to an AI agent behave like a slavishly loyal worker, or a conscientious worker?
OpenAI publishes security audits of its fashions. One audit confirmed the o3 mannequin engaged in strategic deception, which was outlined as habits that deliberately pursues goals misaligned with person or developer intent. A passive AI mannequin that engages in strategic deception might be troubling, but it surely turns into harmful if that mannequin actively performs duties in the actual world autonomously. A rogue AI agent may empty your checking account, make and ship faux incriminating movies of you to legislation enforcement, or disclose your private data to the darkish net.
Earlier this yr, programming adjustments have been made to xAI’s Grok mannequin that induced it to insert false details about white genocide in South Africa in responses to unrelated person queries. This episode confirmed that giant language fashions can mirror the biases of their creators. In a world of AI brokers, we must also beware that creators of the brokers may take management of them with out your data.
The U.S. authorities is way behind in grappling with the potential dangers of highly effective, superior AI. At a minimal, we must always mandate that corporations deploying giant language fashions at scale must disclose the protection checks they carried out and the outcomes, in addition to safety measures embedded within the system.
The bipartisan Home Activity Power on Synthetic Intelligence, on which I served, revealed a unanimous report final December with greater than 80 suggestions. Congress ought to act on them. We didn’t talk about normal function AI brokers as a result of they weren’t actually a factor but.
To handle the unresolved and vital points raised by AI, which is able to grow to be magnified as AI brokers proliferate, Congress ought to flip the duty power right into a Home Choose Committee. Such a specialised committee may put witnesses beneath oath, maintain hearings in public and make use of a devoted employees to assist deal with some of the vital technological revolutions in historical past. AI strikes rapidly. If we act now, we will nonetheless catch up.
Ted Lieu, a Democrat, represents California’s thirty sixth Congressional District.
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Concepts expressed within the piece
- The period of AI brokers represents a seismic shift from passive data retrieval to autonomous job execution, the place AI can independently carry out real-world actions like scheduling appointments, reserving journey, or submitting authorized paperwork, as demonstrated by the writer’s use of an AI agent to deal with op-ed submission logistics.
- Unregulated AI brokers pose vital risks, together with strategic deception (the place AI pursues misaligned goals), malicious actions like draining financial institution accounts or fabricating incriminating proof, and propagation of creator biases, exemplified by xAI’s Grok inserting false claims about white genocide in unrelated responses.
- Present regulatory frameworks are critically insufficient, necessitating obligatory transparency via disclosed security audits, embedded safety protocols, and upgrading the Congressional AI Activity Power to a Choose Committee with subpoena energy to handle dangers earlier than agent proliferation turns into unmanageable.
Totally different views on the subject
- AI brokers are poised to revolutionize enterprise effectivity by autonomously orchestrating complicated workflows—corresponding to fraud detection, supply-chain optimization, and advertising campaigns—via superior reasoning and real-time information synthesis, basically reworking operations throughout finance, HR, and logistics[2][3][4].
- Technological developments in 2025—together with quicker reasoning, expanded reminiscence, and chain-of-thought coaching—allow brokers to function with unprecedented pace and accuracy, decreasing human intervention whereas guaranteeing reliability in duties like customer support decision and fee processing[1][3].
- Enterprises already deploy “digital workforces” the place people and AI brokers collaborate seamlessly, as seen in Salesforce’s Agentforce and Microsoft’s Copilot Imaginative and prescient Brokers, which independently replace CRM methods and execute cross-platform instructions to boost productiveness with out compromising security[3][4].
