This chapter looks at language teacher agency (LTA) by first offering a critique of agency as ‘free-will’, a culture-specific view which posits agency in opposition to structural and cultural influences, while advocating agentive determinism. This view of agency is deemed evident in research on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in language education, which promulgates a paradoxical view of language learners and teachers as (a) instrumentally-driven and calculating, and (b) relatively powerless in the face of ongoing technological developments. Informed by critical realism, this chapter also analyses textual evidence found in academic articles, magazine and newspaper articles, and YouTube videos devoted to GenAI in (language) education which, together, include traces of growing acceptance by researchers, commentators, and language teachers of the agency-as-free-will concept, and technological determinism, an ideological subset of neoliberalism. Reflections and practical recommendations on humanist approaches to LTA and the technology-language pedagogy interaction are offered.