The EU is banning using AI-powered digital assistants throughout on-line conferences. Such assistants are sometimes used to transcribe, take notes, and even report visuals and audio throughout a video convention.

In a presentation from the European Fee delivered to European Digital Innovation Hubs earlier this month, there’s a word on the “On-line Assembly Etiquette” slide that states “No AI Brokers are allowed.”

AI brokers are instruments that may carry out complicated, multi-step duties autonomously usually by interacting with purposes, similar to video conferencing software program. For instance, Salesforce makes use of AI brokers to name gross sales leads.

The Fee confirmed this presentation was the primary time this rule had been imposed however declined to clarify why when questioned by Politico. There isn’t a particular EU laws that covers AI brokers, however the AI fashions that energy them might want to abide by the strict and controversial guidelines of the AI Act.

AI brokers elevate safety considerations

Whereas AI notetakers and different agent sorts will not be inherently a safety menace, in accordance with a 2025 report from world AI specialists, safety dangers stem from the consumer being unaware of what their AI brokers are doing, their innate capability to function exterior of the consumer’s management, and potential AI-to-AI interactions. These components make AI brokers much less predictable than normal fashions.

SEE: How Can AI Be Used Safely? Researchers From Harvard, MIT, IBM & Microsoft Weigh In

Tech corporations do must be cautious when selling merchandise that may accomplish an rising quantity with out the consumer’s consciousness. One of many largest cautionary tales is that of Microsoft Recall, an AI software that allowed customers to regulate their PC or search via information utilizing pure language.

The comfort got here at a value: Recall captured screenshots of lively home windows each few seconds, saving them as a timeline, elevating considerations about privateness and information utilization and resulting in important launch delays. Microsoft has since launched a sequence of brokers particularly designed to sort out cyber threats.

AI brokers are rising in prevalence

This hasn’t stopped the AI gamers from handing over extra management to their fashions. Anthropic added a Pc Use function to its Claude Sonnet chatbot in October 2024, which gave it the flexibility to navigate desktop apps, transfer cursors, click on buttons, and kind textual content. Its deep analysis operate, introduced this week, additionally responds to prompts “agentically,” as does Microsoft’s equal.

Final month, OpenAI expanded its text-to-speech and speech-to-text instruments to agentic fashions, indicating their rising relevancy. In January 2025, OpenAI introduced Operator, an agentic software that runs in-browser to autonomously carry out actions similar to ordering groceries or reserving excursions.

SEE: EU Invests €1.3 Billion to Increase AI Adoption & Enhance ‘Digital Competencies’

Anthropic and OpenAI are even working collectively to enhance agent know-how, with the latter including assist for the previous’s Mannequin Context Protocol, an open-source normal for connecting AI apps, together with brokers, to information repositories. Anthropic has additionally joined forces with Databricks to assist massive company purchasers construct their very own brokers.

roosho predicted on the finish of 2024 that the use of AI brokers will surge this yr. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman echoed this in a January weblog publish, saying “we may even see the primary AI brokers ‘be a part of the workforce’ and materially change the output of corporations.”

By 2028, 33% of enterprise software program purposes will embrace agentic AI, up from lower than 1% in 2024, in accordance with Gartner. A fifth of on-line retailer interactions and at the very least 15% of day-to-day work selections will likely be carried out by brokers by that yr.