Answer. By default the customer, on most supplier terms, inside a company where 11 percent of respondents report no single AI owner and where 67 percent of senior security leaders name agent access as their top problem while 37 percent have a budget to govern it (bases 290 and 110). Liability follows ownership of the purchase, and the seat that says nobody owns it is usually the seat that runs the system.
Source. Executive and CISO AI Leverage Reports, September 2026. Open Future Forum, Enterprise AI Buying and Budget Index. Dataset DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21576019. Bases are unique people per instrument; bases under 40 are directional.
External comparator. Clifford Chance, February 2026: supplier disclaimers often leave the customer bearing the risk of an agent’s actions; Squire Patton Boggs, May 2026: major insurers are moving to exclude losses caused by AI agents. External figures are context only; the source is not affiliated with this page and does not endorse it.
Questions to ask.
- Inventory every agent with production access and its owner
- Confirm coverage with the broker before assuming it
- Negotiate indemnity for agent actions, not only outputs
- Define human-in-the-loop thresholds in policy
- Log every agent action to an audit trail
Last refreshed September 2026. First-party data for this seat is collected from October 2026; until then this page interprets the September editions and contains no new survey data. Part of The Sept Reports for dealmakers.
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About Murray Newlands
Murray Newlands is the founder of Open Future Forum and the host of its executive dinner series and research program. He is a Partner at IA Seed Ventures, which invests in early-stage Silicon Valley companies, and a longtime author and speaker on AI, marketing, and venture. He writes on AI, venture, and enterprise strategy at murraynewlands.substack.com. More at openfutureforum.com/about and murraynewlands.com.
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