Autonomous AI Agents Have an Ethics Problem; Undark, March 5, 2026

 ADAM SCHIAVI, Undark; Autonomous AI Agents Have an Ethics Problem

AI-powered digital assistants can do many complex tasks on their own. But who takes responsibility when they cause harm?

"As a bioethicist and specialist in neurointensive care, I deal directly with human moral agency and the essence of personhood when treating patients. As a researcher, I study the use of synthetic personas animating AI agents and their use as stand-ins of human counterparts. Here is the problem that I see: Granting AI personhood, even in limited capacity, risks formalizing the most dangerous escape hatch of the agentic era — what I will call responsibility laundering. This allows us to say, “It wasn’t me. The agent/bot/system did it.”

Personhood should not be about metaphysics or claims about an inner nature. It is a legal and ethical instrument that allocates rights and accountability. It is a social technology for assigning standing, duties, and limits on what can be done to an entity. If we grant personhood to systems that can act persuasively in public while remaining functionally unaccountable, we create a new class of actors whose harms are everyone’s problem but nobody’s fault.

There is a key concept here that we can use from my field, medicine. In clinical ethics, some decisions are justified yet still leave a “moral residue,” a kind of emotional echo or sense of responsibility that persists after the action because no options fully satisfy competing obligations. This residue accumulates over time, causing a “crescendo effect” that occurs even when conscientious clinicians are doing their best inside imperfect systems. That remainder matters because it reveals something basic about moral life, namely that ethics is not only about choosing; it is about owning what remains afterwards."

Henrietta Lacks’s Family Settles Suit With Novartis Over Use of Her Cells; The New York Times, February 27, 2026

 Michael Levenson , The New York Times; Henrietta Lacks’s Family Settles Suit With Novartis Over Use of Her Cells

"The pharmaceutical giant Novartis has reached a settlement with the family of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken from her without her consent in 1951, when she was dying of cervical cancer in a segregated ward at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

Ms. Lacks’s cells were the first to reproduce in a laboratory, outside the human body, and have been used in groundbreaking research, including to develop vaccines for polio and Covid-19 and treatments for cancer, Parkinson’s and the flu. The National Institutes of Health found the use of her cells, which were known as HeLa cells, was cited more than 110,000 times in scientific publications between 1953 and 2018.

In August 2024, more than 70 years after Ms. Lacks died at age 31 and was buried in an unmarked grave, her family filed a federal lawsuit in Maryland that accused Novartis, which is based in Switzerland, of amassing substantial profits through the use of the HeLa cell line."