News · 14 October 2026
Guest lecture at TalTech: Before the Agent Acts
On Wednesday 14 October 2026 Anton Sokolov gave a guest lecture, “Before the Agent Acts”, in the course ITE4111 Digital Society Principles: Towards e-Governance at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech), in its module on AI in the public sector. The course lead, Dr Eric Jackson, invited the lecture. It took place at the Mektory Innovation Hub in Tallinn: an hour of lecture, then a slot for questions until 20:00.
The lecture starts where most agent demos stop. An AI agent that holds a valid key can sign a payment, a booking or a filing that is correctly signed and still outside what it was allowed to do. From 4 meanings of the word “trust” and a 10-month search that ended with a signed record and a question nobody had asked — signed, but authorised? — the lecture moves to 2 verifiers that check an action against its mandate: a research demo that checks 4 gates between the agent and the money, and a public sandbox that meets 6 tricks with 6 refusals. The thread through both is an action that is authentic and still outside the mandate. The second half asks where the rules stand today: the AI Act timetable, liability for harm caused by AI, and Estonia’s public discussion of an identifier for agents.
The room gave its own verdicts. A poll and an 11-question quiz ran on the students’ phones throughout: whose agent it is, whether an approved payment still stands once the payee’s account is swapped, which of the 4 gates fails when an issuer is missing from the trusted list or a hidden instruction sends money to an unknown vendor, and what the software in command of a spacecraft was built to do when a fault was too serious. Students could also attack the reference verifier in the public sandbox. As the slides told the room, the anonymous vote totals are now open data: per-option totals of the poll and the 11 quiz questions, with the plan written the evening before, on Zenodo under CC BY 4.0 (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23440064).
Two days later the course lead passed on the feedback he had received, which was positive. It was Anton’s first university lecture, and the first time the mandate-verification research reached a classroom after the conference talks of September.
The lecture is dissemination under the research project co-funded by the European Union.