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Start free trial →Front-End Fire · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
The hosts were discussing an employee whose AI agent probed a competitor's systems, and who was being held responsible for what the agent did. VanToll looks ahead to who is liable when an agent breaks the law on a user's instruction.
…I've had it do that. It's done this for me proactively. Been like, hey, would you like me to go and like kind of multitask this across several AWS zones and do things like that? I'm like, uh, okay. You know, I mean, that's kind of hacking. I mean, like, where's the line here? Like, that's, yeah.
…and found bugs and fixed the bugs and kept going. And then at the end, I just kind of reviewed it, did a couple spot checks, and we were great. I mean, that would have taken me hours to set up, find the right pieces of data, get it in the right shape. And Claude just did it all for me. Awesome.
I think where this is going is that this is going to delve into the legal realm pretty quickly. So there's going to be some incident where there's a breach that's consequential and somebody is going to legally go after whoever did this. And then this will end up in the court system to decide where we're going to have court cases where there's going to be arguments is if I ask this and my AI agent did something that is legal. We've talked about felony bench for all the felonies these models have done. Well, what happens if you ask your agent to do something and it commits a felony? Where does blame lie then? And we really don't have the answer to this. And I think we're mere months, maybe weeks away from this getting into the realm of the courts.
Oh, yeah. And it's going to end up with professional licensing and then also probably some sort of malpractice insurance like that I would have to hold as an individual developer or a company would hold for me. You know, I would have to go through certification about indemnity
from what my AI agent
does. Yeah, what is legal and ethical use of AI? You know, what can I prompt? What can't I prompt? You know, da, da, da, da, da. And then, you know, then AI companies are going to go through certification where they're like, hey, you know, we are sock, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever…