AI agents could dissolve the friction that keeps justice expensive
It restructures who holds legal power, where authority comes from, and when law intervenes.
It restructures who holds legal power, where authority comes from, and when law intervenes.
Encoding contracts is a legal choice
Governance needs to be in the architecture conversation, not the incident response.
Karpathy says vibe coding is passé. The new term is "agentic engineering" — and for legal and product teams, the distinction is a governance question, not a branding one.
2026 isn't about new AI capabilities — it's about stabilizing the ones we already have. For product counsel, governance built on shifting tools is governance built on sand.
The authors suggest treating AI agents as "legal actors" — entities that bear duties — without granting them legal personhood.
Legal AI vendors should publish what they refuse to build, not just what they ship. Architectural constraints aren't limitations — they're competitive differentiators. The first privilege breach will prove who got this right.
Advancing AI Negotiations: New Theory and Evidence from a Large-Scale Autonomous Negotiations Competition Authors: Michelle Vaccaro, Michael Caoson, Harang Ju, Sinan Aral, and Jared R. Curhan