Agent Washing
FrontierGovernance, Safety and Ethics
Agent washing is the practice of selling ordinary automation or a scripted chatbot as an autonomous AI agent. The tell is that the product follows a fixed sequence somebody wrote in advance, rather than deciding for itself which steps a task needs. It is the agent-era form of AI washing, and it travels the same route into pitch decks, product pages and valuations.
In practice
Ask a vendor which decisions the system makes without a human or a rule telling it what to do next, and what happens when a task falls outside the expected path. A real agent leaves a log of the steps it chose; rebadged automation has a flowchart.