Accountable Agents in Software Engineering: An Analysis of Terms of Service and a Research Roadmap
AI coding assistants and autonomous agents are becoming integral to software development workflows, reshaping how code is produced, reviewed, and maintained. While recent research has focused mainly on the capabilities and impacts of productivity of these systems, much less attention has been paid to accountability: who is responsible when agents generate, modify, or recommend code? In practice, accountability is defined through the Terms of Service (ToS) and related policy documents that govern the use of AI-powered development tools. In this vision paper, we present a comparative analysis of the Terms of Service for widely used AI coding assistants and agent-enabled development tools. W...
| Authors | Christoph Treude |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 6 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 May 2026 |
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