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Trust Experience Glitches: AI Agents, Delegated Autonomy, and Legitimacy

TalkHelena Rong
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Trust Experience Glitches: AI Agents, Delegated Autonomy, and Legitimacy
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Helena Rong (Assistant Professor at NYU Shanghai, director of the Protopolis Lab) presents a taxonomy of 'trust experience glitches'—six failure modes (agency assertion, epistemic camouflage, delegation ambiguity, opacity at scale, cascading autonomy, revocation failure) drawn from a 167-incident dataset of agentic AI failures. She argues these ruptures expose a 'consequence reception problem' where autonomous agents lack a stable body to bear accountability, and proposes that governance must shift from ex-post legal remedies toward upstream protocol primitives (capability-based permissions, provenance tracking, action-class legibility, circuit breakers, revocability) as the 'traffic lights' of the agentic web.</summary>

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agent-principal-dyadconsequence-reception-problemgovernanceprotocol-primitives-as-traffic-lightsprotocolsresearchsix-part-glitch-taxonomy-agency-assertion-epistemic-camouflage-delegation-ambiguity-opacity-at-scale-cascading-autonomy-revocation-failuresymposium-2026technologytrust-experience-glitch

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