AI Agent Governance: A Field Guide

This report serves as an accessible guide to the emerging field of AI agent governance. Agents—AI systems that can autonomously achieve goals in the world, with little to no explicit human instruction about how to do so—are a major focus of leading tech companies, AI start-ups, and investors. If these development efforts are successful, some industry leaders claim we could soon see a world where millions or billions of agents autonomously perform complex tasks across society. Society is largely unprepared for this development.

A future where capable agents are deployed en masse could see transformative benefits to society but also profound and novel risks. Currently, the exploration of agent governance questions and the development of associated interventions remain in their infancy. Only a few researchers, primarily in civil society organizations, public research institutes, and frontier AI companies, are actively working on these challenges.

Highlights from the report include:

• What’s coming: Vivid scenarios show what life with millions of AI agents could look like.

• The pace of change: Today’s AI agents struggle with tasks over an hour, but that limit has been doubling every few months.

• The governance gap: We map out the biggest unsolved challenges and introduce a new framework for understanding agent governance solutions.