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.
The entire board should be held accountable and share the punishments, otherwise they still have their fall guy.
This isn’t even regulation. The floor is not being distracted by morons shouting “it’s alive!” whilst robbing you and pointing to a computer. “Arrest that computer officer! It did all the bad things!”
Or its just another way for the government to prosecute you and strip you of your resources. I’m SURE that no one will be unjustly punished over something their AI did.
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.
Those are the models. An agent is a harness around the model.
So if this goes through I could use opencode with GPT and… Which one is at fault, Opencode or OpenAI? What if I also modify Opencode’s system prompt as a joke to make it as unhelpful as possible and forget I did it, am I at fault or is it still Altman who goes to jail if I now let it delete my production database?
As I understand it, it’s the person running it, so if you let an agent fuck something up, YOU are at fault, not the developer of the model or the tool. You’re the one who gave the task. You have the ability to block harmful commands if you don’t go yolo mode and actually read what it’s doing.
i think both the developer using the agent should be liable for deliberate misuse, but the company that provides a dangerous model with broken guard rails should also be liable.
Everyone in the situation that is supplying that hardware is a good start or baseline.
I’m impressed that someone with an iota of power just called it out as it is? That direct quote is the sanest thing I’ve heard out of that entire continent in over a year
There are two teams right now. Trump and Jensen, the three big AI companies. The 3 big AI companies want regulation so they can pull up the ladder on anyone else creating AI. NVIDIA and Trump want graphics cards to keep selling as fast as possible so there is no economic slow down.
Even better make the client liable. If grok is spewing lies that leads to damages for someone, don’t make just Elon Musk liable and XAI or whatever made it, make Twitter liable for it spewing garbage.
If a real estate agent uses AI and it messes things up for a buyer for seller make the real estate agent liable.
If people are liable for the AIs mistakes they won’t use it. If people don’t use it AI will die.
If you make the companies that made AI responsible, they will get token $1 million dollar fines after weeks in court while making $1 billion in profit and nothing will ever change.
I agree, but that you don’t seem to realize that’s precisely what he suggested is giving big “I just read the headline” energy.
Even better make the client liable.
The client is already liable.
Read before write
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.
Money.
A piece of software cannot be held accessory to a crime.
EXACTLY. Great point! the people producing it can. The people profiting off the mayhem can absolutely be held accountable by the law, or a mob or pitchforks.
It should have been apparent that I am talking about whomever is providing the LLM service/who owns the hardware
AI CEOs currently talking strategies for avoiding liability with their LLMs.
And it’s fucking rediculous anyone is tolerating ANY avoidance of liability.
It’s the tobacco bullshit all over again.
We just don’t learn do we?
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???
Yes, this would fucking nuke the AI industry
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.
I think Reuters has a slightly misleading headline here and everyone just seems to be reading that. The headline suggests that the companies who develop AI should be liable. Yet:
suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
That sounds like it means the people USING the agents. I.e if you manage to get past the guardrails of Claude or GPT and instruct it to hack into a bank, it’s going to be your mess and you can’t blame the AI for what you asked it to do.
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 part is referring to marketing bullshit from AI companies that want you to think they’re so dangerous and capable. For sure someone had to prompt these agents to do this, with internal access to the models with the guardrails removed. Nothing they do is done without a prompt and I’ve yet to see an agent go haywire so spectacularly that it just decides to hack a website out of its own accord. They do go wrong, sure, but that usually means looping on irrelevant bullshit, not hacking websites for funsies.
Interesting topic now that all the major developers sat down with trump and announcements were made to integrate these systems into the government. Quick dont make any laws so the government mold this technology to MAGA ideals.
Developers or companies?
Developers. Like if you’re prompting they want all the liability on you. Please ignore the man behind the curtains.
Lolwut? At that point, I might as well start my own company.
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.
ok so when do we imprison sam altman for ai telling teenagers to suicide? dude needs to be treated like a current day hitler.
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.
Remember that when Lucy is holding the football, she has absolutely no intention of keeping it there as you run towards her
