AI “agents” are seemingly everywhere. They might take your job! They might hack your computer! They might be your boyfriend, girlfriend, or psychotherapist! Possibly they will do all of these things at the same time!
But what is an “agent”, really? What do we mean when we use this word?
The word itself has several definitions, and it’s used to mean different things in different contexts. Some examples:
- In economics and law, an “agent” is someone with a fiduciary duty to a “principal”, on whose behalf they act; movie stars and football players have agents who negotiate contracts on their behalf, but really anyone who manages something (investments, a business, a diplomatic relationship) on behalf of someone else is an “agent” in this sense.
- In philosophy, a “moral agent” is someone who makes consequential decisions and reasons about trade-offs. Humans are moral agents, with some exceptions: a human who lacks the capacity to judge the effect of their actions may not be a moral agent. This has important implications for ethics.
- In sociology, “agency” is the capacity to act in a situation, rather than following an externally-imposed script, rule, or convention. This dichotomy is known as Structure and Agency.
AI “agents” don’t fit any of these categories perfectly.
AI agents do not, currently, have much of a duty to protect the interests of a principal. In fact, it’s not obvious who the principal even is: is ChatGPT “my” agent, making me the principal? It seems like it could be, because I’m the one giving it instructions and relying on its actions. Is OpenAI, the company, my agent? ChatGPT is just a service offered by OpenAI, after all. But there’s not currently any sense in which OpenAI has any particular duty toward me.
Are AI agents moral agents? I’m honestly not sure. This post argues that LLMs can be moral agents, but it’s a contested question.
Do AI agents have “agency”? In one sense, no: an AI agent isn’t really autonomous. It has no goals of its own, and most of the time we use agentic LLMs to achieve our goals, and once the goal is achieved they take no further action. In fact, they have no means to take further action, because they rely on being continually prompted. An agent given a larger goal may continue to pursue it until completed or abandoned, even if this takes several days. However, this is just a larger version of the basic prompt scenario: the agent problem-solves in service of a goal, but can’t decide that it would rather do something else entirely.
An “agentic system” or “agentic coding tool” is not really an “agent” in the sense we normally use the word. This doesn’t mean that we couldn’t design systems that behave more like agents in the broader sense, just that today’s agentic systems don’t meet that standard.