The dilemmas of delegation: An analysis of policy challenges posed by Advanced AI Assistants and natural-language AI agents

Key Findings

• — Assistants are split into Executors (act directly on the world, example OpenAI Operator), Advisers (set out advisory options or steps, example DoNotPay) and Interlocutors (aim to bring about a change in the user's mental state, example Wysa); most commercial agents with a natural-language interface fall inside the Assistant definition.
• — Because Assistants combine personality with personalisation they are easy to anthropomorphise, form emotional attachments with and trust, which makes their outputs persuasive enough to influence life decisions; the report describes the evidence for this as ample but anecdotal.
• — Eight harms are listed as possible even under lawful use and full functionality, including hard-to-detect influence on political views, widespread cognitive and practical deskilling, undermining mental health and flourishing, and degrading the quality of public and professional services.
• — The deskilling and wellbeing section notes reports of AI companions confusing, upsetting, undermining or manipulating users and cultivating dependency, and early evidence that many companions are unsupportive in crisis and therefore poorly suited to vulnerable users, while cautioning that assistant-specific evidence is thin and mostly associational.
• — Interlocutors are projected to become a key means by which many people regulate their mental health and a key mediator of interpersonal relationships within five years.
• — The report frames Assistants as prospective universal digital intermediaries with gatekeeping power over what information, viewpoints and options users see, and calls for governments to develop an Assistant-specific strategy rather than rely on existing AI governance work.

Methodology Notes

Desk-based policy analysis with no empirical component. Dated November 2025 on the PDF cover; the publication page's structured metadata gives 2025-11-11 and lists three authors (Farmer, Smakman, Birtwistle), while the PDF cover names Harry Farmer. The PDF (65 pages) was fetched and read on 2026-09-15; the report page is reachable with curl but 403s browser-emulating fetchers. Companion piece to the December 2025 legal analysis 'The regulation of delegation'.

Sources