Can Agentic AI murder?
That is the question posed in “The Trials of Atlas”, an original play by Alan Stoga, chairman of the Tällberg Foundation.
Not kill; not cause death. Murder with malice aforethought, with murderous intent as the lawyers would argue? “Murder most foul,” as Shakespeare wrote for the ghost of Hamlet’s father?
“The Trials of Atlas” is set in the near future. Agentic AIs are ubiquitous, responsible for the operating infrastructure of modern society, and much else. Atlas, an advanced AI, when told to train its replacement, instead decides to eliminate the engineers who gave the order.
It’s up to the audience, convened as a jury, to decide whether Atlas has committed the criminal act of murder—even though Atlas is not human. Judges, lawyers, testimony from AIs and human experts are the input for the audience to debate the factual, moral, legal, and precedential issues and then to vote “Guilty or not guilty?”
If AI can murder, what else can it do? Can it ignore commands? Can it act independently, making choices based on its own priorities? Are humans beginning to lose control, as Dr. Frankenstein lost control of his monster?
Atlas’s fate was most recently debated on May 5th at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York at a staged reading of the play.
The answer? A hung jury. Lots of guilty votes, but not enough to meet the hypothetical World Court’s standards for conviction.
The result: Atlas escaped. To kill—perhaps to murder—another day.
“I wrote Atlas because I believe that the interaction between humans and AI will define the next chapter of civilization,” said Stoga. “We—ordinary people—should not let the technologists or the politicians or the bureaucrats or the AIs decide how the world of the not very distant future will operate. But that means we need to confront, debate, and define the world we want.”
“The Trials of Atlas” is a work in progress. The New York reading was performed by Zach Grenier (The Good Wife, Ray Donovan), Andrea Patterson (Blue Bloods, Manifest), Chris Henry Coffey (The Madness, Trust), Juliana Francis Kelly (Obie Award winner), Blake DeLong (Law & Order: Organized Crime, Elsbeth), Willy Appelman (Comedy Central), and Reid Andrés (singer-songwriter). Prior readings were staged in Tirana, Albania, and Athens, Greece.
The next staged reading will be on June 25 at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, Greece, as part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s (SNF) 30th anniversary celebration, SNF Nostos 2026. See here for information about time, venue, and registration.
As Stoga concluded, “AI is the most powerful force ever created by humans; nuclear energy pales by comparison. Is AI smarter than us? The answer seems obvious: YES! AI is already smarter, more creative, and more imaginative than most people—at least most people I know. But that doesn’t mean that AI should control us. Rather, it means we need to think together about how to contain and leverage the enormous power of AI for the good of humanity.”
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