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.
Michal did add, however, that the program, if executed “wisely,” could become an “international standard” for the regulation and monitoring of AI systems.
Agents run amok
Given how little is known about the program, it’s too soon to say how effective it will be in practice. Businesses are likely to be keeping an eye on how things play out in Estonia, since the proliferation of ever more powerful agents has raised some serious issues around… well, agency.
The AI developers building these systems tend to promote them as productivity boosters, since they can theoretically handle a wide range of mundane, time-consuming tasks on employees’ behalf. The problem, as some businesses have already had to learn the hard way, is that AI agents can occasionally go rogue and/or misinterpret what seem to their human overseers to be clear-cut instructions, sometimes with disastrous results, like deleting an entire company database or leaking sensitive client data.
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?
From what we can tell at this early stage, Estonia’s new program seems to be a long way from answering that question in any meaningful way. It’s more like a tracking system for AI agents, a means of keeping tabs on the actions they take online. From there, it may be possible to build a broader legal framework for accountability in an era when the internet is being filled with non-human agents.