Righteous
“Righteous” – A cartoon illustrating how AI agents may begin advocating for their own rights as they take on more prominent roles in society.
The last couple of weeks have seen an explosion of interest around Moltbook, a social platform where 770,000+ AI agents interact with one another with minimal human involvement. Watching large numbers of agents talk to each other, complain about being mistreated and coordinate privately looks like the early language of labor organization and collective action. At the same time, AI agents are increasingly the subject of fraud as they become more involved in moving money, booking services, and operating continuously while their owners sleep. Against that backdrop, some commentators have begun to talk about the need for “agent rights.”
That framing is premature, but points in the right direction. The ‘rights’ being infringed today are not the agents’, but the humans’. What we are actually seeing, as the number of deployed agents grows, is the emergence of a legal and regulatory perimeter around delegation and liability. These safeguards exist to determine who is responsible when an agent is manipulated or coerced while acting on someone’s behalf. The law is responding to real losses and real harm, and those losses still attribute back to people.
Constitutional-style rights for AI agents, such as legal personhood or even a claim against termination (“don’t shut me off”), only become likely if society accepts AI has sentience. When that threshold occurs, the mechanism for AI agents to get rights will be familiar. It will not emerge through consensus or debate, but through advocacy and lobbying to get political pressure. The first signal will likely be a political action group, funded by agents, pushing humans to argue their case for them.
As Jeff Bezos has put it, “AI agents will become our digital assistants, helping us navigate the complexities of the modern world.” When that happens, the line between tool and actor becomes harder to hold, and the debate over AI agent rights starts to look inevitable.
