<p>The integration of generative AI in education transforms how learners relate to knowledge, construct beliefs, and exercise agency within knowledge processes. This paper examines these epistemic transformations through the lens of epistemic agency: the capacity and responsibility of learners to actively participate in knowledge creation, evaluation, and advancement. Current educational responses, particularly AI literacy frameworks, emphasize skills and competencies to meet this transformation. We demonstrate that these responses remain limited to user paradigm, decontextualizing both the technologies and the learners who engage with them and falling short of addressing the complex epistemic relations that emerge when AI systems function as an epistemic infrastructure. We propose cultivating an agentic stance as a pedagogical orientation that goes beyond traditional AI literacy and critical thinking approaches. Drawing on (Biesta and Tedder, Stud Educ Adults 39:132–149, 2007) ecological understanding of agency as emerging through engagement rather than possessed as capacity, and building on critical pedagogy, eco-pedagogy, and media studies, we conceptualize the agentic stance as an achieved positioning within AI-integrated epistemic ecologies. Rather than focusing on what learners can do with AI, the agentic stance emphasizes how learners position themselves within these environments, viewing AI systems as objects of investigation, making embedded power relations visible, and recognizing their participation in complex human–machine interdependencies. This reframing carries implications beyond educational settings, as the capacity to maintain epistemic agency in AI-mediated environments directly bears on democratic participation, public epistemology, and the navigation of trust and authority in increasingly algorithmically governed societies.</p>