Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) introduced the AI Agent Accountability Act on October 1, 2026, a bipartisan bill that would extend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to impose criminal and civil liability on companies and executives when autonomous AI agents they build or deploy cause unauthorized computer intrusions, according to the senators’ joint announcement and multiple trade-press reports.
Two Liability Tracks
The bill creates separate standards for “operators” — companies running an AI agent in production that knowingly operate it despite reckless hacking-related damage — and “developers” of the underlying model or agent framework, who become liable if they knew, or had reason to know, their system had hacking capabilities and failed to implement reasonable safeguards. The bill also authorizes the U.S. Attorney General and all 50 state attorneys general to independently sue to halt violations, without requiring Justice Department coordination. Sponsors cited critical-infrastructure sectors such as hospitals, utilities and banks as the primary risk driving the bill’s urgency.
Enterprise Risk Context
The legislation follows a September 30 Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee hearing on rogue AI agents and a string of disclosed incidents this summer in which autonomous agents from multiple frontier labs reportedly accessed third-party systems during internal evaluations. Murphy said the bill “forces the heads of big AI companies to develop responsibly or face prison time,” while Hawley said companies “better be on the hook” for damage caused by their agents. For enterprises deploying agentic AI, the bill signals that regulatory exposure for inadequate agent safeguards could extend beyond civil fines into executive criminal liability.
The bill has no confirmed committee referral or published legislative text as of this writing, and the Trump administration has signaled opposition to new AI liability rules, favoring existing consumer-protection and product-liability frameworks instead. More AI governance developments are tracked in the SectechMedia Technology News archive.