Behind the Paper: Why I Wrote From Assistants to Agents

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Behind the Paper reflection by Mohamed Salim Ali on From Assistants to Agents, published in AI and Ethics, exploring human–AI co-agency, responsibility, and governance.

I have now shared a Behind the Paper reflection on Springer Nature Research Communities alongside my recent article, “From Assistants to Agents: A Relational Framework for Human–AI Co-Agency,” published in AI and Ethics. The reflection explains the motivation behind the article and the question that shaped it from the beginning: how should we think about responsibility when action is increasingly distributed across humans, AI systems, and institutional structures of delegation, supervision, and governance?

Rather than treating AI only as a tool or as an autonomous actor, the article proposes a relational framework for human–AI co-agency built around four dimensions: initiative, decision scope, oversight, and responsibility attribution.

For me, this remains a practical governance question as much as a conceptual one. The challenge is not machine agency in isolation, but how meaningful human oversight and institutional responsibility can remain visible and operational in increasingly agentic sociotechnical systems.

Behind the Paper: https://go.nature.com/3RhMXNE
SharedIt article access: https://rdcu.be/fgHrc
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-026-01111-5