When a Bot Signs a Contract, Who's Bound? Chopra & White Explained

Описание: When a Bot Signs a Contract, Who's Bound? Chopra & White Explained

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In this video, we break down Samir Chopra and Laurence White's classic analysis of autonomous contracting and the "contracting problem" created by artificial agents.

The paper asks a foundational question for digital commerce: when a bot forms a contract, who should be legally bound by it? Rather than inventing a brand-new legal category for AI systems, Chopra and White argue that agency law already offers a workable answer.

The paper walks through:
why the "mere tool" theory starts to fail as software becomes more autonomous
how actual authority and apparent authority can be translated into algorithmic settings
the paper's taxonomy of specification errors, induction errors, and malfunctions
why agency law can allocate risk more coherently across operators, users, and third parties
how existing legislative approaches compare to the agency-law model

Source paper: Samir Chopra & Laurence White, 'Artificial Agents and the Contracting Problem: A Solution Via an Agency Analysis' (2009) University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology & Policy 363-380.

If you're interested in AI contracts, autonomous agents, legal tech, and the future of digital commerce, this episode gives you a compact map of one of the field's most important early arguments.

#AIContracts #LegalTech #AgencyLaw #AutonomousCommerce #ContractLaw