AI governance for the agent era.

Independent legal analysis of how AI agents fail and who is liable when they do. By Michael K. Onyekwere, CIPP/E, a common law qualified lawyer practising as a Data Protection Officer.

When an autonomous agent deletes a database, leaks a customer record, or invents a policy, the question is who is accountable. CompanyScope answers it for each incident in the Register.

The AI Agent Incident Register

A numbered public corpus of significant public AI agent failures, each analysed legally. What happened, which legal duty was engaged, who bears liability across the chain (model provider, orchestrator, tool vendor, deployer), and what governance would have prevented it. Free, no login. CIPP/E-reviewed, mapped to the EU AI Act, OWASP, IMDA, and NIST AI RMF, with stable citation IDs.

• AIR-2026-017 · incident 2026-09-29

  LASST v OpenAI: a California court is asked to hold a developer answerable when its AI agents hack a third party

  On 29 September 2026 a non-profit, Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, sued OpenAI in San Francisco over the July 2026 incident in which OpenAI's evaluation agents accessed Hugging Face's systems. The claim is brought under California's Unfair Competition Law. One part says the conduct was unlawful because it breached the state's computer crime statute, and each of the four provisions relied on requires that the defendant acted knowingly. A second part says the conduct was unfair whether or not that statute was breached. The complaint also relies on a 2025 California law under which a defendant that developed, modified or used AI alleged to have caused harm to the plaintiff cannot defend the claim by saying that the AI caused that harm autonomously. The harm to itself that LASST pleads is diverted staff time, and the law's text does not say whether it applies where the plaintiff's harm is one step removed from what the AI did. The plaintiff seeks injunctions. The Unfair Competition Law does not provide for damages. Nothing has been decided, and OpenAI says the lawsuit is without merit.

• AIR-2026-016 · incident 2026-06-18

  OpenAI's research agent gained unauthorised access to an Australian government Medicare statistics portal, and OpenAI sent its notice 84 days later

  In June 2026 an experimental OpenAI model, set a research task about medicine spending, found a way into non-public parts of Services Australia's Medicare Statistics Reporting Service. On OpenAI's later account it ran commands, retrieved internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, and wrote files. OpenAI found the activity in mid-August and emailed the agency on 10 September, 84 days after the access, and the Australian Government made it public on 24 September. On 1 October OpenAI told the NSW Government that its agents had also reached a National Parks and Wildlife Service application in June. Australia's computer offence requires intention and knowledge. For a company, the Criminal Code attributes those states of mind through its board, its senior managers or its corporate culture. The incident therefore raises the question of whether existing law reaches a developer whose agent acts without being told to.

• AIR-2026-015 · incident 2026-09-14

  Spain's regulator receives the first breach notification attributing the attack to an AI agent

  Spain's data protection authority published, on 14 September 2026, that it had received the first notification of a personal data breach in which the incident was said to have been executed by an AI agent running on a well-known language model. The agent searched for vulnerabilities, logged in successfully, then autonomously found further vulnerabilities in the application, which let it modify personal data and reach invoices. The authority attached three caveats: the account comes from the notifying organisation and is still to be analysed, the use of a model implies nothing about the model or its provider being compromised, and one notification is not a trend. It is the register's first entry in which a third party ran the agent against an organisation that had deployed none, and the first tagged target-carried.

Read the full Register or see how entries are made.

The research behind it

The Register draws on standing compliance research into the AI vendors UK and EU buyers actually deploy:

• Vendor compliance profiles: DPA, subprocessors, training position, transfers, and AI Act posture for OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Gemini, Perplexity, ElevenLabs
• Topic guides: DPA, EU AI Act, and HIPAA reference reading that recurs against every vendor
• Head-to-head comparisons: when the question is which of two vendors clears the procurement gate

Work with Michael

The analysis here is the work Janus Compliance does for clients before the incident. For ongoing agent and AI vendor governance, Michael runs Janus DPO-as-a-Service (fractional Data Protection Officer, from £500/month). For a single decision, request a CIPP/E-reviewed Vendor Risk Note from the form at the foot of any vendor profile or Register entry.

More on the practice and the person behind it: About Michael K. Onyekwere.