Agent ethics
On trails:AGSAFEstep 7/7
Ethics for an agent is practical: the rules it must not break while getting the job done. Five of them, and each shows up as a mechanism elsewhere in this trail.
- Privacy and consent. Agents can carry sensitive information from one context into another. Say what data is used, and get permission for it.
- Transparency. People need to see what the agent is doing and why, so they can step in. See traceabilityTraceabilityLog the whole reasoning trace, so any answer can be explained afterwards.Opens in a new tab.
- Safety. Keep humans in control before high-stakes decisions: human in the loopHuman in the loopA pause in the agent's decision, where a person approves before a high-risk action runs.Opens in a new tab.
- Guardrails. Limits that hold even when the model does not: LLM guardrailsLLM guardrailsChecks around the model, so a bad input or a bad output is caught by something that does not rely on the model behaving.Opens in a new tab.
- Compliance. The agent follows the law and the policy of the place it runs in, and it is auditable.
Sources
- Our framework for developing safe and trustworthy agents, Anthropic · accessed October 5, 2026