Who keeps the agent? Custody clauses for an AI pilot
Turkish law has long answered who pays when a kept creature causes harm. That rule will not decide an agent case by itself; the useful question is whether your pilot charter names the keeper before an incident does.
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; if another person, or another's animal, startled it, the keeper still answers to the victim, and recourse against the one who startled it is preserved. An analogy, not doctrine; where its conditions are met, Article 71's strict liability for significantly dangerous enterprises may sit closer. As charter language, though, it earns its keep.
It puts three questions in front of any agent pilot, to be answered in writing. Who has care and management: a named person per stage, not a vendor logo. What shows the care that would prevent the harm: the capability set, the release gate and the run logs can carry that proof, kept before anything goes wrong rather than reconstructed after. Who startled the agent: a poisoned document that steers it is the modern spooking, and records of it are what let you identify whoever was behind it; 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and applies to products placed on the market after 9 December 2026, while the separate AI liability proposal was withdrawn in October 2025. Turkish statute has no agent-specific rule yet; a charter allocates what contract can allocate, and the rest stays where the statutes put it.
None of this waits for legislation. Name the keeper, the care standard and the records behind any recourse claim at the start, and decide who holds the leash before an incident decides for you.
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