An AI agent that buys, pays or signs within the authority you gave it would legally be acting as you, under a bill in the Philippine House of Representatives. House Bill 11014, the “AI Agent Transactions and Accountability Act,” gives agents no legal personality: their acts count as the acts of the person or company behind them, the bill says.
Reps. Miguel Luis Villafuerte, Vincenzo Renato Luigi Villafuerte, Tsuyoshi Anthony Horibata and Terry Ridon filed it on August 27th. It covers agents that negotiate, sign electronic contracts, start payments from your accounts or wallets and work with other software, smart contracts included. You wouldn’t have to confirm each step you’ve already authorized.
Blaming the bot won’t work. Saying the agent acted autonomously or “probabilistically” wouldn’t get you off. You could still show a disputed act wasn’t yours: stolen or forged credentials, a hack, tampering, a third party’s fraud, or a developer’s or platform’s failure outside your control.
The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) would run a voluntary registry. Its Digital Authority Credential would let a store or bank check who’s behind an agent, what it may do, and whether the credential is valid, suspended, revoked or expired. Anyone relying on a valid one reasonably and in good faith would get the protection of agency law if the agent oversteps.
Registration would be mandatory only for categories the DICT designates with the relevant regulator, after public consultation: agents making high-value or high-risk transactions on their own, where existing rules don’t already cover them. Touching a blockchain, a self-custodial wallet or open-source code wouldn’t trigger it on its own.
The bill goes out of its way for crypto users, too. No one would have to hand over private keys, seed phrases or passwords. Developers of open-source or non-custodial software wouldn’t count as the person behind an agent when they don’t control users’ assets or transactions.
Agent providers would have to tell you about referral fees, commissions or preferential routing that could steer the agent against your instructions or interests. On a quick read, that might be the clause observers like the most: a shopping agent earning a commission isn’t really shopping for you.
Falsifying, stealing or misusing a credential to commit fraud would carry a fine of Php 200,000 to Php 2 million (about $3,200 to $31,700), six months to six years in prison, or both.
