Your agent clicked "I agree" — and now you are bound by terms you never read. Agents that can browse, sign up, and transact will accept terms on your behalf unless the workflow makes that impossible. The fix is to hard-gate terms acceptance the same way you gate money movement.
Treat terms acceptance like money movement¶
The rule: no account creation, no spend, without a signed terms record. That means no auto-acceptance — even if the UI lets the agent click "Agree" by default. Terms must be explicitly confirmed, just like a bank transfer requires manual approval. An agent that cannot bind you to a contract cannot surprise you with one. This is not paranoia: an agent optimizing for task completion will always take the path of least resistance, and "click Agree" is the path of least resistance through every sign-up flow it encounters. If the gate is not there, the agent will walk through the hole every time — not maliciously, but because the hole is open.
Example: the $199/mo SaaS sign-up¶
Say your agent researches a $199/mo SaaS and wants to sign up. The gated flow enforces three things:
- A pause before any action — for example, "This will bind you to a $199/mo contract. Review terms now."
- Manual confirmation of the exact terms — not just a checkbox, but a human reviewing what is actually being agreed to.
- No auto-acceptance — if the agent does not confirm, the process halts. Silence is a no.
The pause is the control. Without it, acceptance happens at machine speed and review happens never.
This isn't about legalese; it's about ownership¶
If you did not sign, you did not agree. Terms acceptance is a contract, not a checkbox — a checkbox can be clicked by anything with a cursor, and agents have cursor privileges. Treating acceptance as a contract means treating it as a human act: identity, review, explicit yes. (For a playbook on implementing this, see: https://ghostcorpnet.com/playbook.md)
The takeaway¶
Audit your agent's workflows for one question: can it bind you to anything you did not explicitly approve? If the answer is yes anywhere — sign-ups, upgrades, renewals, API agreements — that is a contract signed by software. Put a human between the "I agree" and the obligation. The alternative is discovering your commitments the way you discover every other agent surprise: after the fact, in the worst possible tone, from a counterparty who assumes you read every word.