When There's No Steering Wheel, Who Is Responsible For The AI Agent?

Shreyans Mehta is the cofounder and CTO of Cequence Security, a pioneer of unified application and API protection.

A recent Axios report found that OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are examining tens of thousands of cases in which frontier AI models behaved in ways that external evaluators flagged as concerning.​ The conversation quickly turned to blame and remedy.

Those conversations are worth having, but they skip a practical question that every enterprise deploying agents will face long before regulation arrives: When an agent does something nobody asked it to do, whose responsibility is it?

The autonomous vehicle industry has spent a decade working through exactly this question, and its answer is instructive.

The Driver-Assist Era Of AI Agents

In a car with driver assistance, responsibility is clear. The system helps, but a human sits behind the wheel, is expected to pay attention and is accountable for what happens.

Most enterprise AI governance assumes the same arrangement, with the agent acting and a human in the loop approving consequential steps. That model is failing.

Agents operate at machine speed and organizations are deploying them by the thousands, so approval prompts arriving at that volume get rubber-stamped. The human is still nominally at the wheel but is no longer steering.

The Wheel Is Coming Out

Fully driverless vehicles remove the steering wheel entirely, and with it the fiction that the person inside is in control. Responsibility does not disappear when that happens; it moves to whoever builds and operates the system that is actually driving.

The Car Was Never The Only Safeguard

The part of the analogy most often missed is the road itself because society never relied on automakers alone for safety. Roads have lanes, signals, speed limits and guardrails, along with law enforcement that watches behavior regardless of who or what is driving.