Garry A. Gabison | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Reliable agent engineering should integrate machine-compatible organizational principles

As AI agents built on large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in society, issues of coordination, control, delegation, and accountability are entangled with concerns over their reliability. To design and implement LLM agents around reliable operations, we should consider the task complexity in the application settings and reduce their limitations while striving to minimize agent failures and optimize resource efficiency. High-functioning human organizations have faced similar balancing issues, which led to evidence-based theories that seek to understand their functioning strategies. We examine the parallels between LLM agents and the compatible frameworks in organization science, focusing on what the design, scaling, and management of organizations can inform agentic systems towards improving reliability. We offer three preliminary accounts of organizational principles for AI agent engineering to attain reliability and effectiveness, through balancing agency and capabilities in agent design, resource constraints and performance benefits in agent scaling, and internal and external mechanisms in agent management. Our work extends the growing exchanges between the operational and governance principles of AI systems and social systems to facilitate system integration.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Inherent and emergent liability issues in LLM-based agentic systems: a principal-agent perspective

Agentic systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are becoming progressively more complex and capable. Their increasing agency and expanding deployment settings attract growing attention to effective governance policies, monitoring, and control protocols. Based on the emerging landscape of the agentic market, we analyze potential liability issues arising from the delegated use of LLM agents and their extended systems through a principal-agent perspective. Our analysis complements existing risk-based studies on artificial agency and covers the spectrum of important aspects of the principal-agent relationship and their potential consequences at deployment. Furthermore, we motivate method developments for technical governance along the directions of interpretability and behavior evaluations, reward and conflict management, and the mitigation of misalignment and misconduct through principled engineering of detection and fail-safe mechanisms. By illustrating the outstanding issues in AI liability for LLM-based agentic systems, we aim to inform the system design, auditing, and tracing to enhance transparency and liability attribution.

cs.CY↗