Government report explores risks and controls for AI agents

The Australian Government has commissioned a report to better understand emerging AI agent risks in Australia.

Available from the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, the report is said to offer a framework to help organisations, policymakers and researchers understand and manage the risks when AI agents interact across organisations.

The department commissioned Gradient Institute to do the study and is publishing the report as the Australian AI Safety Institute’s first publication.

As organisations adopt AI agents, those systems will interact with agents that partners, customers, suppliers and unknown external parties use. These interactions can occur within organisations, across organisational boundaries and on the open internet. This creates risks that no single organisation can fully see, control or manage on its own.

The research builds on Gradient Institute’s earlier report, ‘Risk analysis techniques for governed LLM-based multiagent systems’.

It introduces an analytical framework that:

• sets out three deployment tiers based on the minimum level of governance between interacting agents: singular governance, federated governance and open environments
• examines risks, failure types and possible controls across the three tiers
• identifies who may be able to apply particular controls and where gaps remain.
   

The report gives policymakers, organisations and researchers a map of each risk. It shows who can act and points out gaps where no one is currently able to act.

The report can be found here.

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