Digital freedom depends on access rights - by Matt Boulos
SubscribeSign in
Digital freedom depends on access rights<br>Platforms arbitrarily block AI agents. The implications go beyond consumer choice to liberty itself.
Matt Boulos<br>Dec 15, 2025
Share
This piece was originally published in Lawfare on December 11, 2025 as Digital Freedom Depends on Access Rights. Special thanks to Olivia Manes and the Lawfare team for all their help.<br>I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions.
Thanks for reading Lawless Tech! Subscribe to receive new posts.
Subscribe
Twenty-five years ago, legal scholar Lawrence Lessig warned that the architecture of technology—what he called “code”—could become one of the greatest threats to modern liberty, if not for the potential of markets and norms to moderate that risk. He turned out to be half right: Code has since done what he feared it might, but markets have only amplified these effects, and norms have done little to constrain them.<br>We’re now left with law as a last resort, but it may be enough to secure a future in which AI agents can act as a counterbalance to tech’s current trajectory. AI agents—systems that work intelligently and autonomously for a user—are the next step after large language models (LLMs). They work by turning the output of those models into an intelligible sequence of real actions. We now have a critical choice to make about what they will become: The legal framework we give them will either mean that this individualized power tempers the current lawlessness of our digital lives, or render us all the more subject to it.<br>Take privacy law, for example. Over the past century, it strengthened along parallel tracks: From the protection of sealed mail in 1917 to the unanimous warrant requirement of United States v. U.S. District Court in 1972, an understanding eventually emerged that governments couldn’t intrude into private lives without justification. Similarly, William Prosser’s torts in the 1960s became the foundation of private claims to be let alone. But now, in the face of digital technology, those gains are eroding.<br>As our lives move from spaces governed by government to spaces governed by private actors, the distinction between public and private is collapsing—imperiling our rights within each category. On the public front, the federal government has worked to merge datasets holding highly sensitive information, making them readily available to its workers. On the private front, for-profit data gathering has become endemic—yet Prosser’s torts have not been updated, nor federal law instantiated, to account for a completely distinct mode of private intrusion.<br>Because private actors control the digital spaces of our lives and set their rules, governments turn to them to do things they can’t on their own: Until public scrutiny shut the program down, law enforcement had been able to ignore warrant requirements for personal flight data by buying it in advance from airlines, and the Department of Justice can censor the speech of private citizens by asking Apple to remove apps it doesn’t like from the App Store. Private actors have power akin to government, and use it as they see fit.<br>These same capabilities that abet massive information collection also enable centralization and control, which is how we’ve ended up in a world where credit card processors decide in practice the categories that can or can’t be sold online and social media companies almost uniformly employ practices meant to hijack our attention and addict users.<br>The point isn’t that technology companies are misbehaving (though they often are)—it’s that their control of digital technologies gives them an unprecedented amount of power over our lives. We must find a way to wrest it back if we want to be free. AI agents provide a possible solution.
The Role of AI Agents<br>Consider these competing visions. A social media feed is an AI system trained to addict you; an airline’s pricing algorithm is often an AI system that dynamically changes fares to maximize your spending. They give power to platforms. A loyal AI agent does the opposite: It filters your social media feed as you prefer or shops flights across times and airlines to tilt the negotiating balance back in your favor. Without AI agents pushing back in this way, predatory AI systems will deepen their entrenchment of the former picture.<br>A specific category of AI agents called coding agents create software (instead of acting directly on a user’s behalf). In a few years’ time, most people will be able to quickly and cheaply generate custom software for themselves and others. But useful software depends on interactions with other systems and your data. The current rules, as set by the platforms, mean that this access will be capricious at best.<br>This, in turn, means that software that conflicts with the intentions of the major tech platforms will be blocked. As it stands, data brokers can package and sell your data and you have no federal right...