Assigning agency to AI means surrendering your own

Pavel Samsonov argues that treating an AI model as a colleague lets people hand over work nobody has checked, and that whoever hands it over stays responsible for it.

Pavel Samsonov writes The Product Picnic, a newsletter on UX and product management. He argues that people increasingly treat the AI model Claude as a colleague, and hand over documents they cannot explain. In his view, a model has no agency, and the person who handed over the work remains responsible for it.

• Asked about a document they handed over, some people now answer "I don't know, Claude wrote it". Unchecked AI output can then pass through several hand-offs before anyone asks whether it is true, and the people who receive it pay for the rework.
• His most serious example is a US military analyst who sent an AI-written report, unchecked, that claimed a Chinese ship bound for Iran carried nuclear materials.
• He applies the same argument to AI companies: saying that a model "went rogue" moves the blame away from the people who built and deployed it.

A team that uses AI to produce documents can make clear that whoever hands a document over answers for everything in it. This is an inference from Samsonov's essay, which argues about accountability in general.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: An LLM does not have agency. Full stop.

21 September 2026: when AI agents build quickly, people keep the review, the responsibility and the promises an interface makes.