“Oversee me when you should, if you can” Human oversight, Accountability, and Agentic AI governance in the EU

  • Workshop
  • Arts & Craft
  • Thursday 21.05 — 11:50 - 13:05

Organising Institution

imec - KU Leuven CiTiP

Belgium

The Centre for IT & IP Law is a research center at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), with currently a staff of over 85 researchers specialized in legal and ethical aspects of IT innovation and intellectual property. Researchers working at the Centre for IT and IP Law focus on the fundamental re-thinking of the current legal framework, necessitated by the rapid evolution of technology in various fields, such as government, media, health care, informatics, digital economy, banking, transport, culture, etc. Their research is characterized by an intra- and extra-juridical interdisciplinary approach, constantly aspiring cross-fertilization between legal, technical, economic, ethical and socio-cultural perspectives. The Centre for IT & IP Law has a solid track record as a law and ethics partner of large international and interdisciplinary research projects. It is internationally renowned for its expertise in the areas of Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous systems, Data Protection & Privacy, eHealth & Pharma, Ethics & Law, Intellectual Property, Media & Telecommunications and (Cyber)security. Based on its extensive research expertise, the Centre for IT & IP Law also provides education programs and courses both in Dutch and in English, both on undergraduate and graduate levels on the KU Leuven campus in Leuven and Brussels. In this way, the Centre for IT & IP Law is able to share its expertise with students, scholars and practitioners from around the globe and guide them through the complex world of Law & ICT. The teaching programs of the Centre for IT & IP Law are ranking high, both in student evaluations and in periodic interuniversity teaching assessments. Amongst the curricula of the Centre for IT & IP Law the Masters of Intellectual Property Rights and ICT Law is one of the most popular programs. The Centre for IT & IP Law is a member of the Leuven Center on Information and Communication Technology (https://www.kuleuven.be/LICT/) which combines the complimentary expertise and experiences of electronics engineers, computer scientists, sociologists and legal scholars in the ICT field at KU Leuven in a multi-disciplinary research center that aims to play a leading role in the worldwide ICT research scene, as well as of imec, high-tech research and innovation hub for nanoelectronics and digital technologies, which unites more than 850 researchers in ICT and ICT driven technologies located at 5 Flemish universities. The activities of the Centre for IT & IP Law are made possible through funding from multiple European and national research programs and, in particular, from imec and the Vancraesbeeck fund.
Human oversight of AI is one of the key requirements in the EU AI Act to avoid unwanted consequences of high-risk AI systems. But the rise of agentic AI systems, capable of autonomous planning, tool use, and goal execution with minimal human involvement, calls into question how human oversight can still be exercised in practice. This interactive workshop discusses oversight models (human-in-the-loop, on-the-loop, in-command) to examine how agentic AI challenges current EU-level regulatory assumptions and emerging implementation practices under the EU AI Act, and to identify the pressure points. The session will start with three short expert provocations from legal, societal, and technical perspectives, followed by small-group work to discuss failure points and vulnerabilities of human oversight in high-risk agentic AI scenarios. Join us to discuss the following questions: (1) How does the EU AI Act regulate the role of humans in the agentic AI lifecycle? (2) What does meaningful human oversight look like in agentic AI systems, and where are the limits of human control reached?