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AI agents aren’t legally responsible for any harm that they cause, experts say. So who is?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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Local stuff absolutely can do damage to your local data, unless your backups are pull rather than push or are immutable on a file system they are potentially vulnerable. Unless the operating system specifically prevents the agent process from doing something telling it not to is like asking it to pinky promise not to, nothing stops it if the LLM output it relies on says to do so. It's not deterministic like a regular program because it relies on the output from a chaotic black box text generator. All you can say is that it probably won't do those things if it says it won't.
I don’t really know what you want then? People who don’t know how to use a tool properly, but use it anyway, can cause lots of damage. That’s always been the case, and always will be.
There are plenty of safeguards in place, with more and more being added like docker sandbox for example, but nothing will stop confidently stupid people from wrecking their stuff.
What I'm saying is the way it's marketed to be used is much closer to the wrong way and it's far less of a productivity enhancer when used how it really should be and relies on having a lot more professional level IT skills.
What marketing are you talking about?
Every piece of marketing I’ve seen always has disclaimers saying things like “Copilot can be wrong, always check the output”.