Governing Autonomous Software Agents: Accountability Before Capability
Debate about autonomous AI agents often centres on what they can do. This perspective argues that governance should instead start from who is accountable when an agent acts. Drawing on analogies from aviation, finance and medical devices, we propose three design requirements for deployed agents — attributable identity, bounded authority and reconstructable action logs — and discuss how each could be audited. We argue that these requirements are technically modest, can be adopted before agents become more capable, and would make later regulation easier to apply.