AI agents must be as accountable as human workers

[SINGAPORE] When Singapore announced on Jun 2 plans to create a registry of artificial intelligence agents for its 150,000 public officers, it looked, at first glance, like any other development in the city-state’s ambitious AI adoption story.

But upon scrutiny, it signals something more significant: a government acknowledging that AI agents are no longer experimental tools to be piloted with curiosity, but instead operational realities that need to be tracked, owned and governed.

That shift from adoption to accountability is the defining challenge of the agentic AI era. And the stakes are no longer abstract.