The ‘reasonable person’ standard remains one of the most established and widely applied benchmarks in common law systems, including Indian law. It provides an objective measure of conduct across negligence, contract, criminal law, professional regulation and fiduciary duty. However, the standard rests on certain implicit assumptions related to human cognition – such as finite attention, bounded memory, limited processing capacity and qualified foresight – which the deployment of artificial intelligence (“AI”) materially alters.
AI systems challenge the traditional reasonable-person inquiry because they increasingly (i) operate at a speed and scale that no human actor can match, (ii) act with significant autonomy in the absence of contemporaneous human direction and (iii) involve decision-making processes that are probabilistic and difficult to explain. At the same time, such systems may lack context, common sense and the type of intuitive judgment that the law attributes to reasonable persons. In this regard, a functional analysis sensitive to actual capabilities, control, autonomy and consequence may be necessary.
This note addresses the implications of these developments for corporate governance, fiduciary duties, principal-agent relationships, contractual allocation of responsibility and liability exposure. It reviews emerging regulatory and litigation developments across the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States and India, and identifies practical governance measures that organizations can consider while legal standards continue to evolve.
