When a Bot Signs a Contract, Who's Bound? Chopra & White Explained

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In this video, we break down Samir Chopra and Laurence White's classic analysis of autonomous contracting and the "contracting problem" created by artificial agents.

The paper asks a foundational question for digital commerce: when a bot forms a contract, who should be legally bound by it? Rather than inventing a brand-new legal category for AI systems, Chopra and White argue that agency law already offers a workable answer.

The paper walks through:

- why the "mere tool" theory starts to fail as software becomes more autonomous

- how actual authority and apparent authority can be translated into algorithmic settings

- the paper's taxonomy of specification errors, induction errors, and malfunctions

- why agency law can allocate risk more coherently across operators, users, and third parties

- how existing legislative approaches compare to the agency-law model

Source paper: Samir Chopra & Laurence White, 'Artificial Agents and the Contracting Problem: A Solution Via an Agency Analysis' (2009) University of Illinois Journal of Law, Technology & Policy 363-380.

If you're interested in AI contracts, autonomous agents, legal tech, and the future of digital commerce, this episode gives you a compact map of one of the field's most important early arguments.

#AIContracts #LegalTech #AgencyLaw #AutonomousCommerce #ContractLaw