US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.
Well of course. Who else would be liable?
if my car “breaks loose” of its parking break, I’m responsible for every kid it rolls over.
AI companies should be responsible for the damage their AIs do when they “break loose”
Not really, if you set the parking brake and it rolls away, an investigation is conducted. If you failed properly set the brake or it was in such a state of disrepair, it’s your negligence and you’re at fault.
If the investigation determines that the car has a design fault that causes the brake to fail prematurely or your car was manufactured improperly - the manufacturer is at fault.
If, somehow, the road or infrastructure around the car caused the brake to fail… Well, you get it.
Basically, a better example would be “If I fire a gun into the air, I’m responsible for where every bullet lands.”
Yeah, I can guarantee you the companies in question never set the parking brake, so I’m not sure why you took the time to type all that.
Whoever was conducting the testing where agents “broke out” of confinement almost certainly made sure it happened like that, and they probably get off on it, too. Credit where credit’s due, they are probably smart enough to figure out that we wouldn’t be able to deal with it.
Even if you’re giving the benefit of the doubt, still, they didn’t make sure it couldn’t happen, which is trivially easy for the types of people who would be running those tests in the first place. Instead, they just watched those things run amok, or just left it running without those safeguards which, again, are stupidly easy to implement.
How in the fuck could that ever be a question??
No, I will happily pay for all the damage that Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, and Joe’s bait, tackle, taxidermy and AI will inevitably do to me and my family.
I am also looking forward to the stock market bubble to pop destroying my retirement
It is the least I can do
/s
It’s only a stock market bubble if they fail to replace your job! Your retirement could be totally safe, but you better be close. I’m leaning on the AI replacing people in the next year or two. The AI valuations are based on them replacing human labor.
This is the first sensible proposal for regulating AI that I have ever heard. Make the chucklefucks who are unleashing this horror directly responsible for their bullshit.
Chat GPT hacks a government website? 5 years in jail for Altman. Claude agent deletes someone’s database? Amodei gets the bill to fix it.
All AI bullshit stops over night.
Unfortunately the Corporate Veil exists in the US (and most other) legal systems. I personally believe that this is a major root for all of the bullshit we have to deal with on a daily basis. You kill someone, you go to prison. A company has shitty safety intentionally to save money and someone dies, nobody sees prison. CEOs always say they deserve the money because they take the risk… Let’s make that very true.
This causes a nationwide depression in the US which probably infects the world. Also criminal liability doesn’t normally attach to unintended wrongs AND we don’t normally make CEOs directly responsible for all possible wrongs committed by any one of potentially hundreds of thousands of employees because that would be … nonsense.
For every complex problem there is a simple stupid and wrong solution.
Honestly, I have thought long and hard about how to handle the situation where a company commits crimes as a result of their decisions and how to remove the concept of the corporate veil in a way that provides just protections.
Essentially there would need to be an affirmative defense wherein the board and executives must admit to the wrongdoing, but prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the actions were taken by employees with malicious intent against the corporate leadership, either as a whole or against a subset. This means it cannot be weaponized to take out a boss you don’t like, but also it makes it very hard to get out of someone being held criminally liable.
We already have laws that could be used we choose not to use them because we our broken culture doesn’t actually believe in punishing anyone but the poors unless they eat babies and sometimes not even then. You can’t fix our broken culture with slightly different legal tools when we won’t even use the obvious ones we have.
If I hold a fork normally and it jumps out of my hand and stabs little Suzy in the eye it seems like the manufacturer ought to be liable. If I knew it might do that and I use it anyway probably we both are and a court probably gets to decide who bears how much of the fault. In no situation do we assign guilt to the fork even if it would be awfully convenient for everyone but Suzy if the fork which has no assets were the one liable.
If i handed someone a gun without a background check, waiting period, and they were also foaming at the mouth to kill someone would I be liable or criminally accountable? Both??? Why did we end up requiring background checks and holding periods for guns and not forks? If a tesla hits a pedestrian while on autopilot who is at fault? That’s gone through the courts a couple times already. Did they hold TSLA liable???
Llms should be accessories where someone is intentionally doing bad things(criminal neglect or whatever) and should be completely responsible when it without being instructed to do bad things.
The fuck is wrong with us already that this isn’t already obvious.
They made the product and the product is doing illegal things. How is it NOT their fault and responsibility?
It should be safeguarded from doing bad things, by the developers, who should be liable for the public saftey issues the product they sell causes. You should not be able to prompt these things into crime, they should not have jail breaks, and they damn sure shouldnt be developing them into weapons systems. The problem is when you’re aiming the things at surveillance and violence, you’re gonna find a lot of ugly uses for them at home. As we rush these things out to make more money faster, eventually a really unsafe product will ship, an inconceivable use will arise. A jail break that can’t be undone. Yea the producers should be liable and safeguarding their product.
Good. They are catching on
suggestsshould be demands. Spineless and useless.What angers me is that people are buying into the AI shit that the companies are peddlings. These aren’t sentient machines with a will of their own or even any mechanism to do anything on their own. These shit-heels are taking a text generator, trained on doing all sorts of shit, and piping its results into a bash-shell. If you just don’t do that they can’t do any of the damage they did in OpenAI’s case. They try to make it look like they’re figuratively breaking out of a cage or jail. That’s not what’s happening.
They’re given every tool they need and then they add clumsy and inefficient filters on the output text they’re writing. It’s negligent incompetence.
But they do this for a reason. They want legislation to stop what they’re doing. OpenAI specifically does not have an avenue currently where they end up making money, so they want everyone to stop training new models so that they can focus on making a positive cash flow rather than competing.
People need to stop eating the bullshit these companies are shovelling. Yes, if you write an application that breaks into the pentagon you’re looking at jailtime. If you host a LLM that does the same thing it’s the exact same issue. If it did break in then you weren’t paying attention (i.e. being negligent). It’s not a complicated problem.
If the agents are responsible than these assholes are on the hook for thousands of trillions of dollars in back pay.
ok so when do we imprison sam altman for ai telling teenagers to suicide? dude needs to be treated like a current day hitler.
Yeah. Someone is running a program. They’re responsible for what the program does. If you decide to run something with zero idea of what will happen, though luck, still your responsibility.
Okay me and about 3 billion other people are about to start coding like this so good luck prosecuting us all lmfaoo.
Remember that when Lucy is holding the football, she has absolutely no intention of keeping it there as you run towards her
Too right? Like if shit goes down and there’s someone caught for the prompt that made the agents go off into fuck knows what, that person gets charged too right?
The blame lies in both the someone who wrote the prompt and the company that allowed the prompt to go off safeguards.
