AAAI-27 Workshop / Montréal, Canada / February 2027
Who does your AI agent work for?
A workshop on loyal agents: how to build, measure, and govern AI agents that stay faithful to the people they represent.
- When
- February 22 or 23, 2027
- Where
- Montréal, Canada
- Format
- One day, in person
- Part of
- AAAI-27
01 / About
A model can be harmless to the public and still fail the person it represents.
AI agents increasingly act on behalf of people. They spend money, negotiate, and take actions that commit their users to binding transactions. An agent can pass its user's data to a counterparty's agent, or accept an inducement that benefits its operator at the user's expense. General AI safety work does not address this problem.
Human institutions manage it through fiduciary duties. Agents that transact for people need technical infrastructure that does the same.
This workshop convenes the communities working on pieces of the problem, who today publish in separate venues: agent safety and evaluation, multi-agent systems, economics and mechanism design, HCI, and technology law. The day ends with breakout groups that draft a public research agenda, which we will publish on this site.
02 / Topics
Topics of interest
We are interested in the technical, economic, and legal infrastructure that keeps AI agents loyal to the people they represent. The call for papers will list topics in detail.
- 01
Permission management
Authority limits, policy gates, separating proposal from execution, and audit trails that enforce loyalty from outside the model.
- 02
Identity and authenticated delegation
Agent identity, authorized delegation, and how delegation protocols can carry loyalty guarantees.
- 03
Evaluation and measurement
Benchmarks for alignment to the user in economic delegation: multi-step transactions, counterparty inducements, and loyalty decay over long horizons.
- 04
Multi-agent delegation
What happens when one principal's agent deals with another's.
- 05
Transaction and disclosure standards
Records and disclosures that let principals and counterparties verify what an agent did and on whose behalf.
- 06
Conflicts of interest
Platform nudges, operator incentives, advertising-funded agents, and undisclosed service degradation, and how to detect and govern them.
- 07
Law and governance
What fiduciary law, consumer-protection enforcement, and risk frameworks imply for agent design, and which technical properties regulators need agents to have.
- 08
Economic perspectives
Preference elicitation, market structure for agent intermediaries, and the competition and consumer-protection economics of transacting agents.
03 / Agenda
Draft agenda
Draft, subject to changeOne day with two invited talks, two sessions of contributed talks, lightning talks and posters, a panel, and closing breakouts. Times are placeholders until AAAI assigns our day and room.
- Welcome
Opening remarks
Welcome from the organizers and the plan for the day.
- Invited
Invited talk: the technical view
Speaker to be announced.
- Papers
Contributed talks, session one
Talks selected from accepted papers.
- Break
Coffee and posters
- Invited
Invited talk: the law and policy view
Speaker to be announced.
- Papers
Lightning talks
Short presentations of accepted papers, continued at the poster sessions.
- Break
Lunch
- Papers
Contributed talks, session two
Talks selected from accepted papers.
- Panel
Panel: loyalty in deployed agents
Researchers, industry agent builders, and a regulator or legal scholar. Panelists to be announced.
- Break
Coffee and posters
- Breakouts
Breakout groups
Three groups: benchmarks, transaction and disclosure standards, and governance mechanisms.
- Breakouts
Report-outs and closing
Each group reports back. The notes become a public research agenda, published here after the workshop.
04 / Speakers
Invited speakers
We are confirming invited speakers and panelists, and will announce them here.
To be announced
Invited talk, technical
To be announced
Invited talk, law and policy
To be announced
Panel on loyalty in deployed agents
05 / Call for papers
The call for papers will be posted here shortly.
We will invite research papers, position papers, and law and policy contributions. Submission instructions, page limits, and the submission link will appear on this page when the call opens.
Presentations are in person, so at least one author of each accepted paper will need to present in Montréal.
Expected dates
- Papers due
- Notifications to authors
- Camera-ready due
- Workshop in Montréal (day assigned by AAAI)
Dates will be confirmed in the call for papers.
06 / Organizers
Organizing committee
Utsav Gupta
Workshop chair
Stanford University
Elizabeth Porter
Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Andreas Haupt
Harvard Kennedy School, Schmidt Sciences, and Stanford Digital Economy Lab
Dazza Greenwood
CodeX, Stanford Law School
Alex "Sandy" Pentland
MIT Media Lab; Stanford HAI and Digital Economy Lab
The program committee will be listed here once it is confirmed.
07 / Attend
Registration details are coming.
The workshop is open to AAAI-27 attendees. We welcome researchers and practitioners interested in loyal AI agents, from AI, economics, HCI, and law.
Registration runs through AAAI-27. We will link to it here when it opens.
Questions in the meantime? Write to vastu@stanford.edu.