Responsible agentic artificial intelligence governance: Risk, safety, and ethical challenges in autonomous systems

With the development of the systems of artificial intelligence as non-communicative and non-cognitive assistive tools, to autonomous agents independent of human intention rendering decisions and carrying out tasks, society experiences the challenges that it never experienced before in the issues of responsibility of their creation and implementation. The swift decentralization of agentic AI systems into essential sectors such as healthcare, financial systems, transportation, and defense has lagged behind the formulation of sufficient governance strategies, among other aspects of excessively high risks and safety controls and ethical accountability. These systems are autonomous and have the ability to exhibit new emergent behavior and multi-step thinking, which have prompted new safety issues not properly handled by the traditional AI governance frameworks. This literature review is designed in accordance with the PRISMA approach to analyze the existing literature, theories, and new tendencies in the responsible agentic AI regulation in a systematic manner. The discussion has identified that there are severe issues to define effective oversight systems of autonomous AI agents such as checking goal congruency, tracking on emergent capabilities, engineering against negative instrumental actions, and accountability in multi-agent systems. The prevailing systems of governance are characterized by disintegration in the various regulatory systems and there is little coordination between the technical safety actions and the policy actions. The findings indicate that there is a drastic response to adaptive governance constructs able to adjust to the quickly changing AI functions, combination of technical safety protocols with ethics, and formation of international coordination systems.