The ICO’s latest tech futures report focuses on agentic AI. The ICO notes that agentic AI is evolving at pace and that it is essential to consider the risks associated with its deployment.
The ICO report identifies novel agentic AI data protection risks including:
- issues around determining controller and processor responsibilities through the agentic AI supply chain;
- rapid automation of increasingly complex tasks resulting in a larger amount of automated decision-making;
- purposes for agentic processing of personal information being set too broadly to allow for open-ended tasks and general-purpose agents;
- agentic systems processing personal information beyond what is necessary to achieve instructions or aims;
- potential unintended use or inference of special category data;
- increased complexity impacting transparency and the ease with which people can exercise their information rights;
- new threats to cyber security resulting from the nature of agentic AI; and
- concentration of personal information facilitating personal assistant agents.
The ICO notes that poorly implemented agentic systems will increase the risk of data protection harms “e.g. where systems have no clear purposes, are connected to databases which are not needed for their tasks and do not have measures in place to secure access, monitor activity or control the further sharing of information.”
You can find the tech futures report here.
