Estonia Is Giving AI Agents 'Personal Identification Codes'

[highplainsdem]

Source: Gizmodo

Estonia is trying to bring some law and order to the Wild West that is the world of AI agents.

The small Baltic nation plans to assign each AI agent a “personal identification code,” hoping to track what agents do across the internet and identify the people or companies behind them. “It cannot be the case that a person is forced to give their AI assistant access to all of their rights, services, and data,” Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal wrote in a X post on Tuesday. “Agents must have limited, controllable, and auditable authorizations. For example, it must be possible to specify whether an agent may only view data, prepare a document, or act within a fixed monetary limit.”

The post didn’t elaborate on when the new “digital identity” system for AI agents would go into effect, nor on how the Estonian government plans to enforce it. It’s also unclear which agents will be subject to the new law. (Would it be any agent being deployed by a user or company based in Estonia? Any agent developed by an Estonian tech firm? Any agent that handles data emanating from within the Estonian border?) We’ve reached out to the Prime Minister’s office and will provide an update as soon as we know more.

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As is so often the case with AI, it can be very difficult—if not impossible—to actively monitor or subsequently audit the actions taken by an agent. Which, therefore, raises the question: Who or what should be held accountable if an agent goes off the rails and produces some kind of real-world harm? The company that built it? The company that was using it? The IT department? The agent itself, somehow?

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Read more: https://gizmodo.com/estonia-is-giving-ai-agents-personal-identification-codes-2000773016

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The one thing we know for certain, based on recent years of generative AI history, is that the companies that unleashed this very harmful tech on the world will do everything possible to avoid any responsibility for all the harm it does.