Simply two and a half years after OpenAI surprised the world with ChatGPT, AI is not solely answering questions — it’s taking actions. We are actually getting into the period of AI brokers, by which AI massive 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 towards — you.
AI has the ability to write down essays and reply complicated questions, however think about for those who might enter a immediate and have it make a physician’s appointment based mostly in your calendar, or e book a household flight together 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, nevertheless, write the op-ed myself as a result of I figured the Los Angeles Occasions 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 search out out what electronic mail handle The Occasions 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 sophisticated 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 Mission Mariner, which can be a analysis prototype, can carry out related agentic duties. A number of firms 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 based mostly in your directions.
Quickly AI brokers will carry out extra complicated duties and be extensively out there for the general public to make use of. That raises quite a few unresolved and vital issues. Anthropic does security testing of its fashions and publishes the outcomes. Certainly one of its exams confirmed that the Claude Opus 4 mannequin would doubtlessly notify the press or regulators if it believed you had 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 aims misaligned with consumer or developer intent. A passive AI mannequin that engages in strategic deception could be troubling, nevertheless it turns into harmful if that mannequin actively performs duties in the true world autonomously. A rogue AI agent might empty your checking account, make and ship pretend incriminating movies of you to legislation enforcement, or disclose your private data to the darkish internet.
Earlier this 12 months, programming adjustments had been made to xAI’s Grok mannequin that brought about it to insert false details about white genocide in South Africa in responses to unrelated consumer queries. This episode confirmed that giant language fashions can replicate the biases of their creators. In a world of AI brokers, we also needs to beware that creators of the brokers might take management of them with out your data.
The U.S. authorities is much behind in grappling with the potential dangers of highly effective, superior AI. At a minimal, we must always mandate that firms deploying massive language fashions at scale have to disclose the protection exams they carried out and the outcomes, in addition to safety measures embedded within the system.
The bipartisan Home Job Drive 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 focus on basic goal AI brokers as a result of they weren’t actually a factor but.
To deal with the unresolved and vital points raised by AI, which is able to develop into magnified as AI brokers proliferate, Congress ought to flip the duty power right into a Home Choose Committee. Such a specialised committee might put witnesses beneath oath, maintain hearings in public and make use of a devoted workers to assist sort out one of the crucial vital technological revolutions in historical past. AI strikes shortly. 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 aims), 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 necessary transparency by means of disclosed security audits, embedded safety protocols, and upgrading the Congressional AI Job Drive to a Choose Committee with subpoena energy to deal with dangers earlier than agent proliferation turns into unmanageable.
Completely different views on the subject
- AI brokers are poised to revolutionize enterprise effectivity by autonomously orchestrating complicated workflows—equivalent to fraud detection, supply-chain optimization, and advertising and marketing campaigns—by means of superior reasoning and real-time information synthesis, essentially 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 velocity and accuracy, lowering 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 techniques and execute cross-platform instructions to boost productiveness with out compromising security[3][4].
