AI Agents Can't Be Sued: Why Liability Trails Back to Human Operators

When an AI agent autonomously negotiates and signs a contract, it cannot be held legally liable because software has no legal personhood. Legal systems universally agree that liability travels back along the chain of delegation until it reaches a human or entity that can be sued or fined. The challenge becomes more complex in multi-hop deployments where a principal authorizes an agent, which in turn delegates to sub-agents and third-party tools. Determining liability requires identifying, at each step, who held authority, who had sufficient information, and who could have intervened to prevent a bad outcome. Operators must maintain verifiable, timestamped authorization trails — not just policy statements — to demonstrate that governance controls were actually enforced at the moment an agent acted.