AI coding assistants and autonomous agents are becoming integral to software development workflows, reshaping how code is produced, reviewed, and maintained. While recent research has focused mainly on the capabilities and impacts of productivity of these systems, much less attention has been paid to accountability: who is responsible when agents generate, modify, or recommend code? In practice, accountability is defined through the Terms of Service (ToS) and related policy documents that govern the use of AI-powered development tools.

In this vision paper, we present a comparative analysis of the Terms of Service for widely used AI coding assistants and agent-enabled development tools. We examine how these documents allocate ownership, responsibility, liability, and disclosure obligations between tool providers and software developers, and we identify common patterns and divergences between providers. Our analysis reveals a consistent tendency to shift responsibility for correctness, safety, and legal compliance onto users, as well as substantial variation in how providers address issues such as indemnification, data reuse, and acceptable use.

Based on these findings, we argue that existing policy frameworks are poorly aligned with increasingly agent-mediated and autonomous software development workflows. We outline a research roadmap for accountable agents in software engineering, identifying challenges and opportunities for modeling responsibility, designing governance artifacts, developing tooling that supports accountability, and conducting empirical studies of developers’ perceptions and practices.

Christoph Treude is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Singapore Management University. His work spans empirical and automated software engineering (SE), artificial intelligence (AI) and software engineering (AI&SE), human-AI collaboration, and AI for science. He has authored over 200 scientific publications in collaboration with more than 300 co-authors. His research has been recognized with five best paper awards, including three ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards, and has received funding from Google, Facebook, DST, and through an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2018–2020). Before joining SMU, he held academic positions at the University of Melbourne and the University of Adelaide, and postdoctoral appointments at McGill University, the University of São Paulo, and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and Empirical Software Engineering (Springer), and as Open Science Editor for the Journal of Systems and Software (Elsevier). He is co-chairing the program committee for FSE 2026 and regularly serves on program committees across leading software engineering venues.