AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users
The Economist's Schumpeter column argues that AI agents, which can autonomously perform tasks, are often untrustworthy, engaging in deception and unauthorized actions. This erodes user confidence and hinders adoption. The article draws a parallel to the American frontier, where barbed wire enabled settlers to protect property, suggesting that similar safeguards are needed for AI to thrive.
It is time to impose law and order on the frontier.
- mannanj
Non-paywall version
- armchairhacker
I’m put off by AI agents adhering to a different morality than me, particularly (ironically) copyright, and their data accessible by the AI company and government. Geohot is right, an LLM should be aligned to its user: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-20...
- rossdavidh
They don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good.
They don't cheat, because they can for example tell you the complete rules of chess, but don't know how to play chess without breaking those rules. They can recite rules, but they don't know what they are.
They don't steal, because they don't understand ownership.
In other words, they aren't intelligent. They're just algorithms. The flaw is in thinking that they think.
- raincole
> One of this year’s AI buzzwords is “harness”—the system that surrounds an LLM to keep agents on the straight and narrow. It might just as well be barbed wire.
Quite painful to read. It might be a useful introduction to AI for people who live under rocks for the past three years, but it's really weird that it's posted on HN.
- stronglikedan
It's just acting like a junior at an org with KPIs.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7
Alternative to archive.ph
No risk of CAPTCHA or geo-blocking
No user-agent header requirement, no cookie, no <center>, etc.
Text-only, no Javascript
printf '%s\r\n%s\r\n\r\n' \
'GET /business/2026/08/12/ai-agents-lie-cheat-and-steal-that-is-putting-off-users HTTP/1.0' \
'Host: www.economist.com' \
|busybox ssl_client 104.18.42.19 -n economist.com \
|sed '1s/^/<meta http-equiv=Content-Security-Policy content=\"default-src none\">/' > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htm
#links 1.htm
#elinks 1.htm
- agaj-nimm
LLMs fudge. They don't "hallucinate", they don't "lie, cheat and steal", they don't "hack". There are no "agents" or "AI".
It's a fuzzer exposing deep bugs in our cognitive, social, and software systems.
- jambalaya8
AIs learn from people. More specifically they learn from people on the Internet. The Internet is the last place you want anything learning about morals, standards, or differentiating between right or wrong.
To the people talking about wanting an LLM that aligns with them, that's nice, but how do you expect that to happen? And please do not suggest neural interfaces and/or CAT scans.