This week, while I was having lunch, I overheard someone talking about the incident that happened in July 2025 where a Florida mother was coerced into paying $15,000 after an AI cloned her daughter's voice in a way that made it sound like she was in danger.
Immediately, I remembered the article I wrote the previous week about how agentic AI has impacted our decision-making processes.
However, this person who brought up the topic asked a very good question:
Who's truly responsible for the decisions AI makes? The AI itself? Or the developer who made it?
The truth is that it entirely depends on the circumstances that led to the development of the AI, what happened throughout the development process (i.e. if any guardrails were added), and the impact it has had on the individuals using it.
But overall, the responsibility falls entirely on the developers as they are responsible for distributing their product to their clients and/or customers. AI is solely the mouthpiece of the goals and ambitions of the developers.
While there is unintended behavior that they may not have anticipated, it doesn't absolve anyone who developed it from being held accountable. AI is a helpful tool, but it's also a serious one that can go sideways for businesses and individuals who use it.
There are 5 notable instances in which AI or its agentic variant have caused serious consequences as a result of unintended behavior, negligence, or malicious intent stemming from the developers' own decisions:
Air Canada's False Chatbot Response: In November 2022, Jake Moffatt asked a question to Air Canada's chatbot regarding their bereavement refund policy after his grandmother passed away. This led to a claim being denied, resulting in a tribunal case that eventually led to Air Canada being held liable in February 2024, approximately 15 months after the incident. The latter subsequently claimed the AI agent was, in their words, "a separate legal entity" responsible for its own actions..
Waymo Mishaps in Texas: Instances include the deadly March 2026 West Sixth Street shooting in Austin, Texas where a responding Austin PD officer was forced to move a Waymo vehicle after it got stuck to make way for an ambulance responding to the scene, an apartment explosion that occurred in Dallas, Texas in early June 2026 where first responders' path was blocked, and similar incidents occurring from March to May 2026 across North, Central and Southeast Texas, resulting in Waymo suspending their services in the affected cities.
March 2026 Amazon Outages: Amazon experienced multiple outages following a change to its Amazon Web Services platform within the span of a week. This resulted in multiple operations going down worldwide, ranging from checkout to delivery services. While Amazon officials originally cited generative AI as a contributing factor, it subsequently reversed its position, putting the blame on one of their software engineers following "inaccurate advice" from outdated documentation that an AI agent referred to them.
False advertising utilizing well-known South Florida lawyer's image: In June 2026, AI has been used to create false advertisements using South Florida lawyer Ángel Leal's image with the goal of promising deportees a chance of returning to the United States if they paid $1,500 to use his legal services. While not necessarily the result of a developer's actions, the lack of guardrails allowed the scammers to promote their campaign, resulting in multiple federal investigations and Leal's reputation being tarnished through no fault of his own.
Character.AI and Meta AI Studio August 2025 investigations: The Texas Attorney General's office released a statement in August 2025, announcing investigations into Character.AI and Meta AI Studio regarding their chatbot platforms and data privacy/collection practices. The Attorney General's office alleges that both companies have potentially engaged in false advertising and deceptive trade practices by distributing its AI agents to its users without the proper guardrails in place. They allege that as a result, it has led to vulnerable individuals and minors alike to use it for emotional support, despite the products lacking a medical license to practice it.
Based on these five instances, they all point to a similar pattern: a lack of accountability mixed with a lack of guardrails and safety measures in place, resulting from a lack of oversight and responsibility on the developers' part to ensure that these systems were set up in the first place before deploying it to production.
This is the standard that I hold myself to when developing products such as Benny. While no development process is perfect, we can reduce the risk of human error by ensuring that we do our due diligence on what we want our AI agents or any other software product to do.
We have to also realize that as soon as an error is found, we are ultimately responsible for the impact it has on our customers, clients, and end users utilizing the product.
I heavily emphasize this as a software developer because as someone who has worked with customers and clients in the past, every action we take will lead to a chain reaction of small events that lead to severe consequences if they are not addressed properly. If you are still doubting the severity, you can refer to the incidents that have plagued AWS for a week or any other horror story involving a form of AI or its agentic variant.
Currently, I am setting up Benny to detect false leads through the use of different actions, such as detecting user inactivity, context, and past references using a combination of retrieval augmented generation and software engineering principles/ethics with human-in-the-loop approaches (i.e. manual reviews, additional references, escalation, etc.).
Even with all the guardrails in place, Benny will eventually flag an actual lead as a false positive, and vice versa. It often results from malicious actors evolving their tactics. Regardless, those same forementioned measures that are in place will learn from it, reducing the frequency of such events.
Ultimately, the AI is only the mouthpiece for its developer, the individual(s) and/or the company; a PR spokesperson who is there to speak on their behalf.
So, who's truly responsible for the actions of an agentic AI? The AI? Or the developers that wrote it? The answer is simple: it will always come down to the developer, because they have the nuances and mental capability that will determine their behavior that an AI can't develop on their own at this point.
Now ask yourself this question: have you ever let an agentic AI or any form of AI make decisions for you? And if something went wrong, who answered for the impact it caused? You, the person reading this? Or the very system you helped create?