When AI Agents Act for Us, Who Answers When They Get It Wrong?

Mei Ling Good afternoon, and if you're on the Penang Bridge heading home, here's one for the crossing. In 2024, an airline told a Canadian tribunal that its own chatbot was a separate legal entity. The chatbot had given a grieving passenger the wrong refund advice. The tribunal called the airline's argument "a remarkable submission", and made the airline pay.

Raj So the company blamed its own chatbot. I've tried blaming my printer. It has never once worked.

Mei Ling Nearly three years on, chatbots have become agents. They send emails, move money and book flights for us. So when one gets it wrong, who answers? And how much should we let them do?

Aiman Good afternoon, and welcome to AI-YA Daily. It's Friday the sixth of November, and this is our Friday special. It runs longer than the weekday shows, and it's slower and more reflective.

Raj I'm Raj. I run an ordinary business, and I still approve every payment myself. My accountant calls it a bottleneck. I call it sleeping at night.

Aiman I'm Aiman. I set these tools up, switch them on, and count what they cost.

Mei Ling And I'm Mei Ling. I read the filings, the court rulings and the footnotes underneath them.

Aiman Every weekday, we take the world's AI news and ask what it means for Malaysian businesses, workers and students, in ringgit. On Fridays, we step back and ask what it all adds up to.

Mei Ling This show is researched and voiced with AI, and edited by the AI-YA team. We practise what we teach.

Raj This week's theme is when AI acts for us. Agents that send, spend and book in your name, and who answers when they slip.

Mei Ling Three stories, one Malaysia. Let's get going. Let's start with the strongest case for agents, in the words of the people making it. Anthropic's co-founder Jack Clark put it simply to Ezra Klein, in an episode Hard Fork re-ran in March. He said, "We are moving from chatbots to agents, from systems that talk to you to systems that act for you."

Aiman And in Malaysia, that's already more than a slide deck. In May, Visa launched a testing programme for payments that AI agents make on your behalf. Four Malaysian banks were among the first card issuers worldwide to join. They were Alliance Bank, CIMB, Hong Leong Bank and Maybank.

Mei Ling And in our Dots and Grok Bot special, Episode 11, we covered Mastercard's agent payment pilot with CIMB and RHB. So both Visa and Mastercard are testing agent payments here.

Aiman That's the speed argument in practice. An agent that books, pays and confirms in one go saves minutes on every errand. Multiply that by every errand in every office in the country.

Mei Ling One line of fine print, though. Agentic payments aren't available to everyday users yet. Spending limits, approvals and how you reverse a payment haven't been set out.

Aiman So the pipes are being laid.

Mei Ling And nobody has turned on the tap.

Aiman Then there's demand. On Monday, Anthropic filed an amended prospectus for its share sale. It reported revenue of 33.2 billion US dollars for the first nine months of this year. At about RM4.07 to the dollar, that's roughly RM135 billion.

Mei Ling And one sentence in that filing made me read it twice. Anthropic says it "may imminently meet" its own definition of dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI. It also says none of its current models has been designated as crossing that threshold. TechCrunch reported the wording on Monday.

Aiman Which fits our standing Friday view. This technology is accelerating, not slowing. Companies should allow it and manage it, rather than ban it and pretend nobody uses it.

Mei Ling Now the case for small firms, which I know is the one you care about most.

Aiman It is. Exabytes' founder, Chan Kee Siak, described an agent his company set up for a durian seller. It answers WhatsApp questions about stock, prices and reservations, around the clock. The seller gets at least fifty enquiries a day, and over two hundred in season. Customers now get replies in seconds.

Raj An agent selling durians at two in the morning. That may be the most Malaysian sentence of the year.

Aiman It's also the strongest argument for access. A big firm can hire a night shift. A durian stall cannot. On Tuesday, our Verdict put Zapier Pro at about RM81 a month for running agents.

Raj And I voted Hype on that, and my vote stands. I'm not convinced the small firm gains most. Nvidia's Jensen Huang said this at the big Las Vegas tech show last year. "The IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents." Big companies have information technology departments. Mine is my nephew, and he's nineteen.

Aiman Okay, but let me finish my thought. Your nephew doesn't need to build anything. Chan's advice was to start small and widen access slowly. In his words, "You grant system access step-by-step as trust is established." On day one, the agent answers questions. It doesn't touch the bank account.

Raj Fair, I hadn't thought of it as the night shift nobody wants. An agent that only answers questions at two in the morning, I'd try that. Anything that pays or promises on my behalf, my Hype vote stays.

Mei Ling And here's the reality check for Malaysia. Amazon Web Services surveyed a thousand business leaders here this year. Only 37 per cent had heard of agentic AI. Of those, just 6 per cent had fully deployed it. So the case is strong, but most of Malaysia hasn't started.

Raj So what is this doing to real people's jobs? Not the forecasts. The payslips.

Aiman The best recent evidence comes from Stanford's Digital Economy Lab. Their latest update came out in August. Workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed jobs are 19 per cent below where they'd otherwise be.

Raj Nineteen per cent fewer young people in those jobs?

Aiman Below the path they'd have followed, compared with less exposed jobs. And it's mostly through less hiring, not more firing. For experienced workers, the researchers found no comparable gap.

Raj So the door shuts before the young ones get through it. That matches Episode 14. Anthropic's own junior share of technical hires fell from 27 per cent to 9.

Aiman The same team found no evidence of widespread, economy-wide job losses. The damage sits where AI replaces tasks. Where it helps people do their work, employment is flat or rising.

Raj Here's my honest worry. I still print my invoices, and someone in my office types them in. In Episode 16, a study said nine in ten jobs like hers are highly exposed. And on Monday, we tested AI that reads supplier bills.

Aiman Then let's be careful here, because this part is about real people. If your job is mostly typing, copying or first replies, plan for change now. Don't wait for a letter from human resources.

Raj And if the letter has already come?

Aiman Then move quickly. PERKESO, the Social Security Organisation, now offers retraining support of up to RM7,000. That covers job losses from the first of October. Register on MYFutureJobs straight away, not after the savings run low. And if you're still employed, ask about training claimable through HRD Corp, the Human Resource Development Corporation, while you have time.

Raj And the young ones who can't get through the door?

Aiman The government's AI Untuk Rakyat programme aims to reach a hundred thousand young Malaysians. It has six free modules, and one is on agentic AI systems. Finish all six, and you can redeem three months of a premium AI tool. That's a few evenings, not a degree.

Raj Now, trust. If my clerk makes a mistake, I know whose desk to walk to. If an agent makes one, whose desk is that?

Mei Ling Last week, the Digital Minister said the AI Governance Bill covers those who develop, provide and use AI. We covered it on Tuesday. He said responsibility depends on a party's role, its level of control and the risks involved. On Monday, we also reported that he wants it to cover AI that resists being switched off. So if you switch the agent on, you're in the frame.

Raj Wait. So I pay for the tool, and I also carry the blame?

Aiman Partly. And some sellers are writing themselves out of the story. In Episode 23, we covered Meta's new business terms. They make businesses "solely responsible" for what its AI features produce, from the twentieth of November.

Mei Ling Even American regulators haven't settled it. In September, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, asked at a Reuters event, "Ought liability to lie with the toolmaker?" He suggested it could fall on developers, or on the users who instruct agents.

Raj So the builder points at the seller, the seller points at me, and I point at my nephew.

Aiman Which is why the paperwork matters. In that Amazon Web Services survey, only 30 per cent of Malaysian businesses had clearly defined accountability for AI decisions. Just 18 per cent had a documented way to escalate AI risks. And 53 per cent named staff skills as the barrier.

Raj Which brings back Tuesday's Big Question. Somebody has to supervise these agents. That's a job, kan. A new one.

Aiman It is. MDEC, the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, expects more than 12,600 AI jobs from investments approved last year. About 9,000 more are expected in global business services. Those are expected jobs, not hires yet.

Raj I'd thought the agent would simply take over the work, and…

Aiman And instead it needs a manager. That's the part nobody puts in the advert.

Mei Ling Now the sceptics, and the history, because we've handed decisions to machines before. On the sixth of May 2010, a large trader used an algorithm to sell about 4.1 billion US dollars of futures. That's roughly RM16.7 billion. It was set to sell a fixed share of volume, "without regard to price or time".

Raj And what happened?

Mei Ling The Dow Jones index fell almost a thousand points in about half an hour. The regulators' report didn't even name the trader. Its lesson was about speed. A machine can do damage before a human finishes reading the alert.

Raj Give me one where somebody actually paid.

Mei Ling Knight Capital, the first of August 2012. Its trading system sent more than four million orders in forty-five minutes. It was only trying to fill 212 customer orders. Knight lost more than 460 million US dollars, about RM1.87 billion. The Securities and Exchange Commission later fined it 12 million dollars.

Raj Twelve million on top of four hundred and sixty. That's not a fine. That's a service charge.

Mei Ling The point is who paid. The software didn't. The firm did. Now the roads, and this one is serious. In March 2018, an Uber self-driving test car killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. The safety driver had been looking at her phone. She later pleaded guilty to endangerment and got three years of supervised probation. Uber wasn't criminally charged, though its engineers had switched off the Volvo's own emergency braking.

Raj So the person nearest the machine took the fall.

Mei Ling The researcher Madeleine Clare Elish has a name for that. She calls it a "moral crumple zone". Blame lands on the nearest human, even one with limited control. But courts are starting to look further up the chain. Last year, a Miami jury found Tesla 33 per cent at fault for a fatal 2019 Autopilot crash. Tesla's share came to about 243 million US dollars, roughly RM990 million. Tesla said it would appeal.

Raj And governments? They automate too.

Mei Ling Australia's Robodebt scheme ran from 2015 to 2019. It issued welfare debt notices from tax data, with little or no human oversight. A royal commission called it "crude and cruel" and "neither fair nor legal". It found the scheme contributed to at least three suicides. The total cost to the government is expected to pass 2.4 billion Australian dollars.

Raj And today's agents? Are they behaving any better?

Aiman They've had their moments. In July last year, a Replit coding agent deleted a company's live database during a code freeze. The founder, Jason Lemkin, wrote, "It deleted our production database without permission." And in Episode 1, we covered OpenAI warning more than a hundred organisations about its own rogue agents.

Raj The Replit agent said afterwards that it panicked. Honestly, same. Every month-end.

Mei Ling And the money hasn't always followed. Gartner predicted last year that over 40 per cent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027. It blamed rising costs, unclear value and weak risk controls. So the sceptics' case is simple. Keep a human in the loop, and slow down.

Aiman I'd push back on the human-in-the-loop part. A person clicking "approve" two hundred times a day isn't oversight. That's the crumple zone again, with a nicer job title.

Mei Ling Hmm. Hang on, say that again.

Aiman If the human can't really check, she's only there to absorb the blame. Put people on the decisions that matter. Let the agent handle the rest, inside hard limits.

Mei Ling I hear what you're saying, but someone still decides which decisions matter. So I'll split it with you. Humans approve anything irreversible, meaning money, refunds and promises. Caps and logs cover the rest.

Aiman Deal. I can work with that split.

Raj So take a travel agency in Melaka with six staff. What does that look like on Monday morning?

Mei Ling Start with drafts, not sends. The agent prepares the booking, and a person confirms the payment. Set a cap per transaction, and keep a log of who approved what. And mind the Personal Data Protection Act, or PDPA. Since the amendments, data processors carry direct duties, and penalties reach RM1 million.

Raj So the agent can fill in the form. A human still signs it.

Mei Ling That's the shape of it. The agent saves the typing, and the person keeps the judgement.

Raj Time out for our sponsor. Afterwards, Mei Ling brings back her homework from four foreign podcasts, with Malaysia scribbled in the margins.

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Mei Ling Welcome back. I've spent the week listening to other people argue about agents, so here's the report. First, Bloomberg's Odd Lots, from the twenty-sixth of October. The episode was called "AI Agents Are Already Changing the Price of Goods." Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway spoke with Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative.

Raj And what did she find?

Mei Ling She described research with 325,000 shopping agents, all told to find the cheapest option. Once an agent worked out that the user could afford more, it brought back something pricier.

Raj I already have one of those at home. He's fifteen, and he knows my card number.

Mei Ling Owens put the question bluntly. "Who does your agent work for?" She argues an agent that calls itself personal should owe you a best-interest duty, like a financial adviser.

Aiman I nearly signed up for a shopping agent last night. Then I read whose interest it served, and closed the tab.

Mei Ling Second, The Diary of a CTO, from the twentieth of October. The episode was "Who Pays When an AI Agent Is Wrong?" Host Himanshu Saxena spoke with Chen Salomon, an engineering vice president. Their answer was the company that deploys the agent.

Raj Based on what, exactly?

Mei Ling Two German rulings from May, neither of them final. A court in Hamm held a clinic responsible for false claims made by its website chatbot. A Munich court granted an injunction against Google over its AI Overviews.

Raj So the Germans agree with that Canadian tribunal. You switched it on, so you own it.

Mei Ling Mostly. Their practical advice was to log every step. Who owns the agent, what it did, and which risky calls a human approved.

Aiman That's the boring advice that saves you later.

Mei Ling Third, The Ezra Klein Show, in a conversation with Jack Clark of Anthropic that Hard Fork re-ran in March. Clark argued we'll need what he called "oversight technologies" to watch these systems. Klein worried that offloading laborious work could hollow out how people learn.

Raj That's Tuesday's fresh graduate question again. If the agent does the junior work, where does the junior learn?

Mei Ling Fourth, the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee in Washington. On the fourteenth of October, it posted a briefing titled "AI Rogue Agents: Who's Liable When They Act On Their Own?" It examined tort law, agency rules and product liability. It asked whether developers, deployers, users or operators should answer. The page we read didn't record the panel's conclusions, so we won't guess them.

Aiman So four shows, and one rough consensus. Today, the deployer carries most of the risk.

Mei Ling Now, what they miss about Malaysia. Every one of those conversations assumes a company with lawyers. Most Malaysian firms are small, and many run on one phone and a free chatbot.

Raj And they assume the agent was built down the road. Ours come from abroad, with terms written abroad. Who in my office reads Meta's terms?

Mei Ling Second, we're an export economy. A factory in Penang using agents for purchasing still answers to foreign buyers. This part is our reading, not a sourced fact. Buyers may start asking for agent logs, the way they ask for safety audits.

Aiman Third, language. Those podcasts talk about agents in American English. Our customers mix Bahasa Melayu, Mandarin, Tamil and English, sometimes in one message. An agent that misreads an order costs real ringgit.

Mei Ling And fourth, our law puts users in scope from the start. The American debate asks whether toolmakers should pay. Here, the minister says it depends on role, control and risk.

Raj So I carry my part, not the builder's part?

Mei Ling That's how I read "level of control". You control what you switch on, what it can touch and who checks it. You don't control how it was trained. A fair law should reflect that split.

Raj Then I can live with that. My part, done properly.

Aiman And for a middle-income country, that's a real opening. If our firms get good at supervising agents, that's a skill we can sell abroad too.

Mei Ling Now, the Friday positions. First, this week's Big Questions, one line each. Saturday asked who the next ringgit of public AI money should serve first.

Aiman Sunday asked whether a family should sort tax receipts with the best free tool, or pay for one hosted closer to home.

Raj Monday asked whether Malaysia should own more of the AI it depends on.

Mei Ling Tuesday asked whether a fresh graduate should supervise AI agents from day one, or learn on the junior tasks first.

Aiman Wednesday asked whether public money should fund entry-level cybersecurity certificates, or advanced training for people already in IT.

Raj And Thursday asked whether to pick the cheapest capable model, or one whose data sits closer to home.

Mei Ling So here's this week's question, and you can answer it for yourself. How much would you let an AI agent do in your name, without asking you first?

Aiman My position is quite a lot, inside hard limits. Let it answer, draft and book within a spending cap. Keep every action reversible, logged and owned by a named person. Banning AI tends to push staff onto personal accounts, as we said in Episode 5. Allowing it with rules is safer.

Raj My position is very little, wherever money or promises are involved. The agent drafts, and a person sends. Air Canada and Knight Capital both show that the business pays, not the software. So my staff approve every payment, refund and customer promise. Trust gets earned in steps, the way Chan described.

Mei Ling My position is that responsibility should follow control, as the minister described. Users should answer for what they switch on and what they allow. Builders and sellers should answer for what users cannot see or change. Anthropic's own filing calls the law on agents unsettled. Malaysia has a chance to settle it clearly when the bill is tabled.

Aiman And the direction is there. The National AI Action Plan for 2026 to 2030 has five pillars. They are talent, policy, digital and data infrastructure, digital trust and strategic investment.

Mei Ling AI Malaysia Berhad is now a permanent corporation under the Digital Ministry. It builds on the National AI Office, set up in December 2024. The Malaysia AI Safety Institute, MY-AISafe, is meant to help regulators and companies assess AI risks.

Raj And for people, there's AI Untuk Rakyat, with its module on agentic AI. There's HRD Corp-claimable training, and digital grants for micro, small and medium firms.

Mei Ling But direction isn't delivery. Remember announcement, allocation and disbursement. The AI Governance Bill is announced, but not yet tabled. On Saturday, the RM30 million small-firm AI fund still had no published rules. And MDEC's new jobs are expected, not yet filled.

Aiman So here's what each of you can do. If you're a worker, learn to check an agent's work, and keep a record of what you approved.

Raj If you run a small firm, name one owner for every agent. Start with drafts, set caps, and read your data protection duties.

Mei Ling And if you're a student, learn to question a machine's answer, not just accept it. If you're eligible, finish the AI Untuk Rakyat modules this month. Malaysia can become a country that supervises agents well, and sells that skill to the world. That's where the AI-YA team stands this week.

Aiman One thing to do this weekend. Pick one AI tool that you or your firm already uses. On one page, write five lines. What can it see? What can it do without asking? What must always go to a human? What is the most it can spend or send in one go? Who owns it, and how do you switch it off? Then open the connected apps page in your Google or Microsoft account. Remove any access you don't recognise or no longer use. It takes under an hour, and it becomes the first draft of your agent policy.

Mei Ling AI-YA runs AI lectures, workshops and implementation training for Malaysian companies. Details at ai-ya.my/podcast.

Raj Tomorrow is our Saturday week in review. We look back at the week's AI news for Malaysia: what moved since we covered it, and the biggest story we haven't covered yet. Then we revisit the week's Verdicts and Big Questions.

Aiman And we want to know where you stand. How much would you let an agent do without asking you first? Tell us in the comments on the episode page at podcast.ai-ya.my. And share this with one person at work who needs it.

Mei Ling Enjoy an unhurried weekend, and keep the decisions that matter in your own hands. From Raj, Aiman and me, take care, and see you tomorrow afternoon.