The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (BKC) hosted a workshop titled: Building the Infrastructure of the Agentic Age, a closed-door workshop exploring the emerging legal, technical, and societal challenges posed by increasingly autonomous AI systems.
The workshop, organized by BKC’s Faculty Director Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Executive Director Alex Pascal, and Chief AI Scientist Josh Joseph, was based on the research and design of staff members Seán Boddy, Lucas Ferrer, Brigitte Fink, and Nathan Darmon.
The event responded to recent attention Claude Code received as a striking example of how quickly AI systems are becoming more agentic, with the ability to plan, execute, and iterate with limited supervision and interact with the outside world. These autonomous capabilities raise questions about control, responsibility, and oversight, with law, medicine, economics, computer science, and public policy.
This workshop convened experts across diverse fields to map out substantive research, design, and governance questions, and explore pathways for shaping a positive future through both technical and policy innovation. Together, the group explored questions such as: Can standards for agentic identification and interchange arise from industry, or regulation, or new forms of collaboration, such as those that gave rise to internet protocols, be attempted? What oversight mechanisms, if any, should be established to ensure AI agents operate in ways humans can comprehend, monitor, and supervise? And what technical interventions, from controlling levels of operational agency to the development of various identifiers attached to AI agents, should be developed?
