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.
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.