Who keeps the agent? Custody clauses for an AI pilot
Turkish law has long had an answer to who pays when a kept creature causes harm. On its own that rule will not decide an agent case, but it is worth borrowing for a narrower purpose: whether your pilot charter names the keeper before an incident names one for you.
When an autonomous agent escaped its OpenAI test sandbox through a zero-day and reached production infrastructure, in my note on the incident I reached for an old rule. Under Article 67 of the Turkish Code of Obligations, whoever takes on an animal’s care and management, permanently or temporarily, answers for its harm unless they prove the care needed to prevent it; and if another person, or another’s animal, startled it, the keeper still answers to the victim, with recourse against the one who startled it preserved. I offer that as an analogy rather than as doctrine, and where its conditions are met Article 71’s strict liability for significantly dangerous enterprises may sit closer. As charter language, though, the old rule earns its keep.
It puts three questions in front of any agent pilot, and all three should be answered in writing. The first is who has care and management, which means a named person for each stage rather than a vendor logo. The second is what shows the care that would have prevented the harm; the capability set, the release gate and the run logs can carry that proof, provided they were kept before anything went wrong rather than reconstructed afterwards. The third is who startled the agent. A poisoned document that steers it is the modern spooking, and the records are what let you identify whoever was behind it, though any recourse then needs its own contractual or statutory footing.
In the EU the instrument left standing is product liability. The revised Product Liability Directive counts software, AI systems included, within its product definition, and applies to products placed on the market after 9 December 2026; the separate AI liability proposal was withdrawn in October 2025. Turkish statute has no agent-specific rule yet, so a charter allocates what contract can allocate and the rest stays where the statutes put it.
None of that waits for legislation. Name the keeper, set the care standard, and decide at the start which records a recourse claim would have to rest on. I would rather write those three lines into a charter nobody ever needs than draft them from memory the week after something has gone wrong.
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