Letter from 2035: Did Agentic AI get too much agency?

The role of AI agents should be legally and socially clear before they begin running human lives

- RAHUL MATTHAN

The future arrived quietly, wrapped in convenience. When they first appeared on the scene in 2025, AI agents were simple. We used them to schedule meetings, write emails and occasionally help negotiate with customer care. We were delighted to outsource these relatively low-stake tasks to a digital assistant that was able to perform them so well. Over time, we began to rely on them implicitly.

Today, in the year 2035, Agentic AI is our primary interface with the world. These digital assistants have over the past decade transformed from marginally helpful tools into our virtual proxies. Not only do we use them to execute complex tasks under our instructions, we've grown so confident in their ability to know exactly what we want that we allow them to anticipate our needs and make decisions on our behalf. As a result, we have in many aspects of our daily lives completely withdrawn from daily interactions, leaving our AI agents to participate on our behalf. In the process, the world changed without our knowledge, and in ways we did not anticipate.

By 2026, AI agents were negotiating our contracts, investing our money and even managing our commercial relationships, so much so that we have, by now, grown accustomed to their acting on our behalf. Today, we all have so many AI agents out in the world that it's hard to keep them all aligned. Every now and then, one of them commits us to behave in ways that contradict what another agent promised to do, and we find ourselves in court over this.