Automated Contracting and the Principle of Freedom of Contract: Rethinking Consent, Responsibility, and Legal Certainty in AI-Driven Transactions

The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in commercial transactions has moved automation from the mere transmission of human declarations to the generation of contractual actions by systems that select counterparties, negotiate terms, and execute performance with minimal human review. This development places sustained pressure on the principle of freedom of contract, which presupposes that binding obligations arise from the free and informed will of autonomous parties. This article examines how consent, responsibility, and legal certainty should be reconceived when contracts are formed and performed by deterministic and non-deterministic automated systems. Using normative juridical research with statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, the study analyses the Indonesian Civil Code and the Electronic Information and Transactions Law alongside the UNCITRAL Model Law on Automated Contracting (2024), the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, and recent scholarship published between 2021 and 2026. The findings show that classical consent doctrine remains serviceable only if consent is relocated from the individual transaction to the moment of deployment, so that a party's will is expressed through the design, parameters, and supervision of the system it chooses to use. The study further finds that responsibility should follow attribution to the user of the system, tempered by a reasonable-expectation exception for unexpected actions and backed by non-avoidance, transparency, and auditability duties. The article proposes a model of "deployment-based consent" and "structured responsibility" as a basis for reforming Indonesian electronic contract law and securing legal certainty without sacrificing contractual autonomy.

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