New Delhi, June 2 -- Nine years ago, in an article in this column, I tried to imagine what would happen if autonomous algorithms were let loose in a digital market with instructions to maximize profit. I believed that, even if they had not explicitly been told to do so, they would find ways to collude with other algorithms to achieve that outcome. If this happened, I had pointed out, our laws would be woefully ill-suited to address it.

Nine years later, agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is here-and the problem is not that our laws cannot reach it. It's that the legal doctrine that does may reach too far.

What happens when autonomous AI agents are set loose in a market?

In a recent experiment, researchers gave a pair of large languag...