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ARTICLE · 09 DECEMBER 2025

The Rise Of The Machines: Agentic AI

Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP
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If 2024 and 2025 were defined by the rise of large language models (LLMs) and the innovation they unlocked, 2026 is emerging as the year of agentic AI.

CanadaTechnology
Sam Ip
Sam Ip
Simon Hodgett
Simon Hodgett
Joanna Fine
Joanna Fine
Kim Maguire
Kim Maguire
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Key Takeaways

  • Agentic AI raises legal implications in a variety of areas including intellectual property, privacy, tax, and commercial contracting, requiring adaptive compliance approaches.
  • Privacy risks increase as autonomous agents handle data, making consent and transparency more challenging for organizations.
  • Commercial contracts must adapt to reflect the role of agentic AI as active decision-makers, demanding new risk allocation strategies.

If 2024 and 2025 were defined by the rise of large language models (LLMs) and the innovation they unlocked, 2026 is emerging as the year of agentic AI. In our 2024 Osler Legal Outlook article, Unlocking AI innovation, we explored how the first wave of generative AI showed how models could summarize, draft and analyze information. The next wave of generative AI will go significantly further and is expected to include systems built on top of LLMs that can plan and act autonomously. AI is evolving from simply a tool

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