Willison Argues LLM Agents Should Never Be Directly Responsible Individuals

Simon Willison·medium signal

Riffing on Apple's DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) management concept, Willison makes the case that an LLM agent can never legitimately be a DRI because accountability requires an entity that can actually be held responsible, and a machine cannot. It's a sharp, quotable governance framing for teams deciding how much autonomy to hand production agents. A useful counterweight to the current 'let the agent own it end-to-end' enthusiasm.