The Rise of AI Agents and Ethical Challenges

Due to the rapid advancement of LLMs, AI agents, which go beyond simple tools to plan and execute actions on their own to achieve goals, are emerging as a new technical trend.

The core of AI agents is Autonomy. When given a high-level goal, an agent can break it down into sub-tasks and carry out complex tasks without human intervention.

However, as a system's autonomy increases, the following risks accompany it:

• Safety: Risks arising as it becomes harder for developers to predict all of a system's actions
• Privacy & Security: Data exposure and security vulnerabilities that can occur during autonomous actions
• Trust: Cascading harm caused by misplaced trust in unsafe systems

Instead of fully autonomous agents that could result in a total loss of control, HuggingFace proposes developing Semi-autonomous agents that balance human control with technical benefits.